Issues: October 2002

Thursday October 31

CULTURE CAPITAL FINALISTS: Six finalists for the 2008 European Capital of Culture have been named. They are Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, Newcastle/Gateshead and Oxford. “The rivalry between the cities has been fierce, owing to the benefits previous holders of the title have received. The UK’s last City of Culture – Glasgow in 1990 – saw a massive increase in tourism as a result of winning the title.” BBC 10/31/02

A GROWING RIFT BETWEEN EUROPE AND AMERICA: Are America and Europe growing further apart culturally? Politically, relations have been getting worse in recent years, but culturally a gap seems to be widening as well. “The more the European masses appear to be hooked on American popular culture, the more bitterly their elites decry the U.S. as the profitable but cynical pusher.” Commentary 10/02

WHY WE LEARN? What is the purpose of an education in America today? Is the purpose to get a job, get into college? Is it to create reflective citizens who are capable of self-government, both in the realm of politics and emotion? Is it to instruct students in the rules of society and in the love of learning? Is it all of the above? And if it is, what is preventing us from attaining those goals on a broader, more universal scale?” A panel of thinkers on education gets together to debate the future. Harper’s 10/02

IGNORING THE ARTS: The state of Massachusetts has always been a haven for progressive politics and a leader in arts support, but this year may be different. Artists are concerned about the commitment of the two leading gubernatorial candidates to public arts funding in a year when the state cultural council saw its budget slashed by more than 60%. Neither candidate has even a vague outline of a position on the future of the arts, and the arts community doesn’t seem to have the political clout to change that. Boston Globe 10/31/02

BRIT TRASH (AND WE LOVE IT): There was a time when English cultural exports to the US were civilized, intelligent. No more. “The most powerful British influences on American culture today are ferociously crass, unvarnished, unseemly – and completely unapologetic about it. They are, in fact, one of the latest assaults on what was once quite a civilized country.” The New Republic 10/28/02

Wednesday October 30

THE NEW ARTS SCHOLARSHIPS: With corporate donations shrinking and government support declinign, arts groups across America are looking for new benefactors. And many are finding them in colleges and universities. “The colleges are providing not just rehearsal facilities, technical support and audiences but also money for new works.” The New York Times 10/30/02

A CULTURE PLAN: Portland Oregon arts groups hired a consultant to justify their aspirations to build a “Lincoln Center West.” But the consultants came back saying it wasn’t a smart idea. Instead, they said, address overcrowding in the city’s main arts buildings, and spend $200 million-plus on renovations and mixed-use facilities. The arts groups love it. The Oregonian 10/28/02

Tuesday October 29

IN PRAISE OF GENERALISTS: Of course we want students to be focused. We want them to excel. But specialization without a broad general education leads to myopic thinking. So maybe we ought to come up with some program of broad general graduate study, suggests Catherine Stimpson. Chronicle of Higher Education 11/01/02

Monday October 28

RETHINKING UK ARTS FUNDING: Has British public funding of the arts backfired on itself? “The English system of funding has fallen victim to the necessity of political justification. Everything has to have a catch phrase – outreach, cultural diversity, accessibility. All these things were inherent in the best companies anyway – but it has led to tremendous bureaucracy. What can be done? Are there lessons to be gleaned from abroad about the way we fund our arts?” The Guardian (UK) 10/28/02

THE UNIVERSAL SNOB: Snobism has been democratized, writes David Brooks. “Everybody can be a snob, because everybody can look down from the heights of his mountaintop at those millions of poor saps who are less accomplished in the field of, say, skateboard jumping, or who are total poseurs when it comes to financial instruments, or who are sadly backward when it comes to social awareness or the salvation of their own souls. We now have thousands of specialized magazines, newsletters, and Web sites catering to every social, ethnic, religious, and professional clique.” The Atlantic 11/02

MORE THAN JUST A HAMBURGER BATTLE: When a storefront on the 473-year-old central square plaza of Oaxaca, Mexico recently came vacant, presevationists were apalled to discover that McDonald’s was the intended new tenant. “Should a multinational giant, in return for investment in one of Mexico’s poorest states, be ceded space in the very center of a culturally distinctive city?” Los Angeles Times 10/28/02

SO WHO IS DANA GIOIA? Nominated by President Bush to be chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia is “a writer with a background as a businessman. He is a registered Republican who voted for George W. Bush and for his father before that. His poetry is not political. His criticism, essays and reviews are not polemical. Rather, Mr. Gioia appears to be someone with a wide range of artistic and intellectual interests who is passionate about making poetry more accessible to the public. Yes, his essay Can Poetry Matter?, which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1991 and then in a collection of his essays, angered academics because he accused them of making poetry an insular enterprise.” The New York Times 10/28/02

Sunday October 27

THE DANGER OF LOWBROW: Most people consider lowbrow entertainment to be a guilty pleasure, certainly not terribly enriching, but not particularly harmful, either. But Michael Berkely thinks that our appetite for mindless entertainment is destroying serious, challenging art: “Labels and classifications tend to lead to preconceptions; in any case, a huge amount of art defies category. But I do differentiate between entertainment and what I call Hard Art, between Big Brother and Wozzeck, if you like.” The Guardian (UK) 10/26/02

Friday October 25

GIOIA IS A GEM: George Bush’s choice of poet Dana Gioia as the new chair of the National Endowment for the Arts is a terrific one, writes J. Bottum. “Mr. Gioia is the kind of person for whom the job of chairing the NEA was first created. He is a major figure in American letters, an experienced business executive and a man with a passion for great art. There’s something satisfyingly ironic in this.” OpinionJournal 10/24/02

GETTING DOWN: How do American arts groups cope with a down economy? “Museums make cutbacks, reduce budgets, lay off personnel. Symphony orchestras search for new donors, new ways to get cash. A theater group pulls back its cast sizes. A big city opera cuts salaries of its top directors. This is the drama of making the arts work in a slowing economy… Seattle Post-Intelligencer (AP) 10/24/02

  • TOUGH TIMES IN ATLANTA: Atlanta arts groups are facing deficits and tough times. “Even arts groups with healthy, balanced books are worried about running up deficits in the current economic environment. Since most lack endowments, they are dependent on earned income – namely ticket sales. One false move at the box office could spell disaster. With that in mind, some organizations have adopted conservative measures.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 10/24/02
  • SEATTLE SLOWDOWN: After spending more than a billion dollars on building new arts facilities, Seattle arts groups are finding a slowdown in attendance and financial support… Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10/24/02

Thursday October 24

BUSH APPOINTS NEW NEA CHAIR: President George Bush has nominated poet Dana Gioia as the next chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts. “Gioia, 51, won this year’s American Book Award for his third book of poems, Interrogations at Noon. His best-known book, Can Poetry Matter?, is a study of poetry in modern American culture.” Nando Times (AP) 10/24/02

RETURN ON INVESTMENT: A new study of the Denver arts scene reveals what several other recent surveys have concluded on a national level to be true for the local area as well: the arts are a darned good investment of public funds. “Cultural revenue was $208 million, half earned through ticket and other sales and the other half through contributions and cultural tourism generated $139 million, including attracting 860,000 visitors from outside the state.” Denver Business Journal 10/22/02

HIGH ART’S LOW AMBITIONS: Robert Brustein is pessimistic about modern culture. “We are witnessing the not-so-gradual disappearance of what used to pass for American high art, whether we are talking about performing arts or serious literature or classical music or the visual arts. When ruled entirely by profit, the quality of art is bound to the client and so is any openness to risk or to adventure. The days are over, I think, when publishers took chances on good writers who were unknown or difficult in order to bring distinction to a list dominated by bestsellers.” Partisan Review 10/02

Wednesday October 23

BUST FOLLOWS BIG BOOM: In the four years between 1997 and 2001, Orange County California experienced an arts boom, says a new study. “According to the survey, the take from paid admissions to museums, performances and arts festivals soared 58.6% during the boom economy – from $29.5 million in 1997 to $46.8 million in 2001. The number of paying patrons rose 37%, from 1.45 million to 2 million. Donations to operating budgets grew 65.1%, from $29.8 million to $49.2 million. With total income up 56.2%, the arts groups raised their spending even more aggressively – by 58.9%. The number of full-time employees increased 40%, from 417 to 585.” And then came the slowdown after 9/11… Los Angeles Times 10/23/02

Tuesday October 22

CANADIAN ARTS DOWN: The 1990s were a terrible decade for Canadian arts institutions. A new study reports that attendance and funding were down, while expenses went up. The number of performances and exhitions fell. “Total attendance dropped by five per cent in the decade, to roughly 13.3 million from 14 million. At the same time, rising costs resulted in virtually all the country’s largest performing arts organizations – the Stratford and Shaw Theatre Festivals excepted – reporting deficits.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/22/02

WHEN PARIS WAS EXTRAORDINARY: What was it that made Parid the explosion of art it became between the two World Wars? “If you wanted three words to define the extraordinary period in the arts in Paris between 1918 and the end of the 1920s, they would be ‘energy’, ‘colour’ and ‘iconoclasm’.” The Guardian (UK) 10/18/02

Monday October 21

AMERICANS FOR THE ARTS SUES BANK OVER STOCK PORTFOLIO: The Washington-based arts advocacy group Americans for the Arts has filed a lawsuit against a bank charging it with negligence and breach of fiduciary duty. The group says the bank failed to diversify a stock portfolio trust consisting entirely of Eli Lilly stock, leading to the loss of $81 million from the trusts in nine months. Nando Times (AP) 10/20/02

Sunday October 20

THE FOUNDATION OF OUR SUPPORT: Across America charitable foundations are cutting back their grants as their endowments shrink with the stock market. The cutbacks figure to have big consequences on cultural groups that have also seen their funding from corporations and governments fall. But aren’t times of economic stress precisely the times when foundations should step forward with more help, rather than less? It’s a matter of giving philosophy… San Francisco Chronicle 10/18/02

THE SORRY PLIGHT OF THE NEA: The National Endowment for the Arts has been without a leader for ten months now. There’s no sign of a replacement, though the rumored shortlist has been the same for months. Last week an internal reorganization by the acting head of the NEA caused a stir, but the agancy has so little clout these days no one’s much paying attention. Chicago Tribune 10/20/02

CLASSIC CONFLICTS: More musicians are also showing up as critics in Philadelphia’s music scene. Is this healthy? “It’s the classic journalism-school question. How do you stay neutral as a reporter when the best way to cover a certain community is to be part of it? You can’t easily reconcile these things.” Philadelphia Inquirer 10/20/02

Friday October 18

ARGENTINA – ART IN A TIME OF CRISIS: “The Argentine economic crisis, in statistical terms at least as severe as the Great Depression, has profoundly altered the arts in this country – but not in the way one might expect. Despite the crisis, or more likely because of it, new performance and exhibition spaces have opened, artistic groups have formed and attendance at cultural events has stayed the same or increased.” The American Prospect 10/16/02

WASHINGTON’S KENNEDY CENTER GETS UPGRADE: “To make it easier for the millions of visitors who visit each year, the Kennedy Center is embarking on the largest performing arts construction project in the country – estimated at $650 million – to connect the center to the Mall. Most of the money was approved by Congress and the bill was signed by President Bush.” The New York Times (AP) 10/17/02

AN ARTS PLAN FOR PORTLAND OREGON: A report says that Portland Oregon needs $200 million worth of new and renovated arts buildings over the next ten years. Arts leaders has expected the report to recommend building a single large arts complex, but the recommendation calls for a series of projects. “It was very clear early on that a Lincoln Center West was far beyond what was necessary or realistic for the community.” The Oregonian 10/17/02

Thursday October 17

THE VISA PROBLEM: What’s the point of the Americans declining or delaying visas for prominent foreign artists? How can it be seen as anything other than an insult? “How would Americans respond if another country announced that Steven Spielberg or Bruce Springsteen would have to sit out an awards ceremony so that background checks could be completed to make sure they weren’t terrorists? Would we think that reasonable? Would we assume that no insult was intended against the United States?” Poppolitics.com 10/16/02

NOT SO CUTTING EDGE, AND THE WEATHER CAN BE DODGY, BUT… The 17th annual Melbourne Festival is opening. “There are far too many festivals in the country now, the word has been overused and de-vitalised in a way. Melbourne has held up very well . . . it has brought performances and performers to Melbourne that we otherwise wouldn’t see.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/17/02

Wednesday October 16

KENNEDY CENTER TO SUPPORT MINORITY ARTISTS: Washington’s Kennedy Center has announced a new program designed to strengthen American arts groups operated by minorities, which often find themselves marginalized by the larger arts scene. The program will be unique in that it will not simply throw money at groups deemed worthy, but will attempt to ‘loan out’ the expertise of the Kennedy Center’s top people, with regular consultations, strategy sessions, and technical and financial advice. Washington Post 10/16/02

SEASONAL DISORDER: Fewer Americans are buying season tickets for arts events and buying more single tickets. “This trend, exacerbated by the economic slowdown, may have enormous effects on what is presented, who attends and how performing arts groups manage their budgets. In classical music, more seats are being sold overall — 32 million attended the symphony nationwide last season, up from 27 million a decade ago — but for shorter series and on shorter notice, often through the Internet.” The New York Times 10/16/02

ART VS. APATHY: There is an increasing disconnect between people who spend their lives enmeshed in the world of art, and people who don’t, and the gulf is marginalizing an entire industry. “In my experience, the art people speak only to art people, and believe, from this unrepresentative sample group, that people who read an intelligent newspaper — sensitive people like judges or cabinet ministers or television producers — are arguing daily with their husbands over the tea and toast about whether the paper’s art critic has really understood the limitations of postpainterly abstractionism. In fact, for many if not most of my acquaintances who aren’t actually artists, newspaper articles about the art world have a status only marginally higher than that of the bridge column. They are perceived as serving a niche equally small.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 10/16/02

COPYRIGHTS AND THE VOX POPULI: The Digital Millenium Copyright Act was hailed by musicians’ unions and the recording industry for protecting copyrighted material, and excoriated by consumer advocates for being draconian and unreasonably restrictive on the rights of music and video buyers. The two sides could not be further apart on the issues, and now a period of ‘public comment’ is set to begin later this fall. There will be town meetings and solicitation of public opinion, and at the end of it all, the Librarian of Congress will rule on what sorts of exceptions exist under the DMCA. Trouble is, most observers believe that the legislation leaves no room for exceptions, regardless of what the public wants. Wired 10/16/02

SOUTH AFRICA ON THE MOVE: For awhile after apartheid ended in South Africa, the country’s creative artists fell silent. It was if they needed to take a pause and think. But in today’s South Africa, art flourishes – “there are new festivals, new production companies, one-man shows in small towns, powerful amateur productions by kids in townships that will astound you. This is the renaissance.” The Guardian (UK) 10/16/02

Tuesday October 15

NARROW DEFINITIONS: Does multiculturalism slot cultures into narrow categories from which it’s hard to escape? In other words – should traditional native art be practiced only by natives? Or traditional Celtic craft produced only by… well, you get the point…”Please. If there is one thing we have discovered about globalization, surely it’s that no culture can survive without support from outside itself.” The Globe & mail (Canada) 10/15/02

AMERICA’S COPYHISTORY: American copyright law has become more and more restrictive over the years. And big corporate American copyright-holders complain about piracy of their material internationally. But historically Americans were enthusiastic pirates themselves. Back in the 19th century “American law offered copyright protection — but only to citizens and residents of the United States. The works of English authors were copied with abandon and sold cheap to an American public hungry for books. This so irritated Charles Dickens — whose Christmas Carol sold for 6 cents a copy in America, versus $2.50 in England — that he toured the United States in 1842, urging the adoption of international copyright protection as being in the long-term interest of American authors and publishers.” The New York Times 10/14/02

Monday October 14

THE DOWNSIDE OF AN ECONOMIC CASE FOR ART: It might have been effective at first to make economic arguments for the arts in Australia. But “it’s the kind of language that turns our society into ‘the economy’, of citizens into ‘the consumers’ and our public funds into ‘taxpayers’ money’.” And it results in creatively “arid” programming, say arts administrators attending a weekend conference. Sydney Morning Herald 10/14/02

WHY THE RIGHT NEEDS TO GET CULTURED: There’s no denying that artists, historically, have tended towards the left side of the political spectrum, and as a result, right-of-center politicians have developed a bad habit of ignoring cultural issues completely. But “culture is now a huge earner, overtaking coal, steel and the motor industry. It is also a vital social issue as millions contend with shorter working weeks and long retirements. It cries out for a policy rethink. To ignore culture in the 21st century spells electoral suicide.” London Evening Standard 10/14/02

WHAT’S A MAYOR TO DO? Seattle’s $127 million redo of its Opera House is about $28 million short. So the city’s mayor had a choice – loan the project money (with the risk of never getting it back) or see construction shut down. He chose to come through with the cash, and now he’s being attacked. “People are seeing the contrast again between the mayor’s cutbacks in funding for human needs, fire and policing, and instead giving tens of millions to buildings.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10/12/02

CAN ART END AN EMBARGO? The 42-year-old embargo of Cuba by the U.S. government looks shakier than ever these days, and most observers consider it a matter of time before relations between the two countries begin to heal. This is bad news for the consistently hard-line Cuban immigrant community centered in Miami, but the growth of Cuban culture in the U.S. is one of the driving forces behind the push for the embargo’s removal. In fact, Cuba’s contributions to the American arts scene are becoming more and more noticable, and “both the United States and Cuba… are using culture as a political tool aimed at bypassing politics and reconnecting the two peoples.” Dallas Morning News 10/14/02

Sunday October 13

WHAT ECONOMIC RECOVERY? Even as the government continues to insist that America is on the road to better economic times, the stock market continues to take large chunks out of some of the nation’s heaviest wallets, and that uncertainty is causing severe pains to U.S. arts groups, and not just from their dwindling endowments. In the last months, Alberto Vilar and Ted Turner, two of America’s biggest arts supporters, have warned of possible defaults on their pledges to various groups, and countless more heavy hitters in the philanthropic world are said to be in similar financial straits. Even worse, the continuing tide of corporate scandals is making CEOs cautious about spending their money on arts groups, and that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon. The New York Times 10/11/02

  • CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF, the arts actually represent a darned good investment for state and local governments. A new study “found that the nonprofit arts industry (museums, theater companies, performing arts centers, orchestras, dance companies, arts councils) generates $134 billion in economic activity nationally every year,” yet these programs are nearly always the first to have their funding slashed or yanked completely when a difficult economy threatens. And that’s not going to change until arts groups make a concerted and organized effort to demonstrate the financial gains of government support to the people who decide where the money goes. Boston Globe 10/12/02

CAN’T IT JUST BE ART? MAYBE NOT: In an age when it doesn’t seem to be enough for art to just be pleasant or thought-provoking or challenging, arts proponents are lined up around the block to promote music, art, dance, and the like as a veritable balm for the soul, a healer and soother of the stresses of modern life. The latest example was the global series of concerts commemorating the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Al-Qaeda terrorists, and while the sentiment of the organizers was clearly in the right place, Peter Dobrin worries that we are “preaching to the choir. The harder task is to convince spiritual have-nots that they are have-nots, and to give to them something more human to reach for.” Philadelphia Inquirer 10/13/02

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS: “Arts organizations in Alberta have mixed feelings about proposed facelifts for the Jubilee Auditoriums in Edmonton and Calgary. The $30-million renovation project will spruce up the theatres, which are home to more than 50 arts groups. At the same time, however, the projects will put those same groups out on the street for a full calendar year.” Among the groups slated to be temporarily homeless is the Edmonton Opera, which says there is no other hall in the city suitable for fully staged opera. CBC Arts Report 10/12/02

ATTACKING ART, LITERALLY: Cultural terrorism – the destruction of public art and artifacts in the name of political gain – has yet to reach American shores, but is a major concern around the world. “The shelling of the Bosnian National Library in Sarejevo in August 1992, by Serbian nationalists dug in the hills surrounding the city… and the fire it caused, destroyed thousands of priceless manuscripts and books, as well as gutting a historic and beautiful building.” And who could forget the Taliban’s destruction of the massive Bamyan Buddhas in Afghanistan as the world’s cultural leaders pleaded with them to stop? Such acts of wanton destruction are often minimized when placed alongside terrorist attacks on human life, but the cold reality is that the cultural death toll may be more permanent than the human one. Toronto Star 10/12/02

Thursday October 10

COPYRIGHT CASE GETS A HEARING AT THE SUPREME COURT: In a landmark case which could change the way copyright law is administered in the U.S., the Supreme Court is hearing arguments on the issue of whether Congress may extend current copyrights past their original expiration, as it did in 1998, and keep popular images, songs, and art out of the public domain, where they could be used by anyone without permission or payment. The suit was filed by Internet archivist Eric Eldred, who “runs an Internet archive called Eldritch Press, which includes such books as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 19th-century classic The Scarlet Letter. But the 1998 law would have forced him to pay to publish works from the ’20s such as stories by Sherwood Anderson and some poems by Robert Frost.” Washington Post 10/10/02

  • FREE SPEECH, SURE, BUT PROFIT, TOO: So what’s at the heart of the Eldred case? Money, pure and simple, although one might be hard-pressed to describe the plaintiff himself as much of a hardline capitalist. But the essence of the law being challenged is that it prevents the public, and, by extension, private companies, from using such beloved symbols as the face of Mickey Mouse or the text of The Great Gatsby for personal gain and profit. Of course, the copyright extension law which sparked the case came about only after determined lobbying by wealthy copyright holders, so the greed runs both ways. The New York Times (AP) 10/09/02
  • DANCING ON THE EDGE OF LEGALITY: “If current copyright laws had been on the books when jazz musicians were borrowing riffs from other artists in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators were creating cartoons in the 1940s, entire art genres such as hip-hop, collage and Pop Art might never have existed. To acknowledge this landmark case, an exhibit will celebrate ‘degenerate art’ in a corporate age: art and ideas on the fringes of intellectual property law.” Wired 10/10/02

MUCH MORE OF THIS, AND IT’LL BE JUST LIKE THE U.S.: “Toronto’s financial support of its major cultural institutions has declined by 35 per cent in the past decade at the same time as the regional economy grew by 40 per cent, a city report says… The report points out the difficulties that Canada’s largest city has had maintaining its commitments since amalgamation, the shifting of responsibilities from the provincial government to the municipalities, and the lack of any additional significant taxation powers beyond the traditional property levy.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 10/10/02

Wednesday October 9

DECLINE IN VALUE: American arts organizations are facing a triple whammy – declining corporate support because of the economy, cuts in government support, and – because of the battered stock market – substantial declines in the value of endowments. “This has been the most challenging time for our cultural institutions in my memory. We’re seeing erosions between 15 and 60 percent in the market value of endowments at arts institutions nationwide.” The Star-Tribune (Mpls) 10/09/02

AWARDS CUT BACK: The Toronto Arts Awards have canceled three of its nine prizes this year, including those for visual arts, writing, and a lifetime achievement award. Organizers say they weren’t able to raise the money for them, even though they carry only a $2,500 prize each. “From its inception 15 years ago, when each award was worth $10,000, the prizes have declined to the current situation, where the winner receives no money but is allowed to spend $2,500 on a ‘protégé’ award to an up-and-coming artist of his or her choice.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/09/02

Tuesday October 8

THE RIGHTS OF CREATIVITY: This week’s arguments in front of the US Supreme Court about the constitutionality of the copyright laws is really a battle over how we as a society will get to use our creativity. Opponents of the 1998 extension of the copyright law – which include “dozens of the nation’s leading law professors, several library groups, 17 prominent economists, and a coalition of both liberal and conservative political action groups – say it serves no legitimate public purpose, violates the clear intentions of our nation’s founders regarding copyrights and is unconstitutional.” SFGate 09/26/02

  • BUT PROPERTY IS PROPERTY: Alex Beam is irritated by those who believe public domain is a right of society. “We accept without question that certain intellectual property, like books, should eventually belong to the public. Why? My friend Dean Crawford builds houses and writes novels. Would we confiscate his rights to a home he built after 70 years? Of course not. Would we restrict his freedom to sell a home to whomever he chooses? No.” Boston Globe 10/08/02
  • HIGH STAKES: To the plaintiffs of Eldred v. Ashcroft, the future of the public domain for intellectual property is at stake. “If we lose, then you can say goodbye to any meaningful public domain.” Wired 10/08/02

ISRAEL – OUT OF THE LOOP: Artists have stopped going to Israel. “In the past two years, ever since the outbreak of the second intifada, a virtual blockade has been set up between the cultural world of the West and Israel. Performers and ensembles are canceling performances here, and even more are not even booking dates. The situation is so bad that the impresario business, which had specialized in bringing international acts to Israel, is on the brink of collapse.” Ha’aretz (Israel) 10/08/02

ORANGE COUNTY DELAYS CONCERT HALL: The Orange County Performing Arts Center is pushing back the opening of its new $200 million concert hall by a year. But it’s not because fundraising has dried up, says the center’s management. “About $100 million has been raised or pledged since the campaign began nearly three years ago. But, amid a plummeting stock market and other economic woes, only $3.5 million in new donations has been announced in the last 12 months.” No, the reason is acoustical: “Because of its complex acoustical engineering, they said, the 2,000-seat hall requires a break-in time of three to six months to ‘tune’ it for peak sonic performance, and pushing to keep to the original schedule would have risked getting off to a bad start. ‘A lot of cities have looked at the Philadelphia experience and are making sure they have plenty of time for the tuning period’.” Los Angeles Times 10/08/02

Monday October 7

CHALLENGING THE MICKEY MOUSE LAW: This week the US Supreme Court will hear a challenge to “a 1998 law that extended copyright protection an additional 20 years for cultural works, thereby protecting movies, plays, books and music for a total of 70 years after the author’s death or for 95 years from publication for works created by or for corporations.” Plaintiffs will argue that the extension removes thousands of important creative works from public use. Baltimore Sun (AP) 10/07/02

VISA CASUALTIES: The Afro-Cuban Allstars Band is the latest in a now-burgeoning list of foreign artists who have had to cancel American appearances because they were unable to obtain visas to enter the country. “The visa requirements have created a huge back-up in the approval process and resulted in the cancellation of concerts and the loss of millions of dollars in bookings.” San Jose Mercury-News 10/06/02

OF CRIMINALS AND ARTISTS: A controversial theory suggests that artists and criminals have a lot in common: they both break the rules. Both “express a primal rage. Love, hate, fury, despair and passion can be given utterance with brushes and pens, or with guns and knives. Artists enjoy seeing themselves as raffish outsiders, people of dubious morality.” The Observer (UK) 10/06/02

Sunday October 6

NEA REORGANIZATION: The National Endowment for the Arts is undergoing a major organizational restructuring. Some worry that the changes are being made while the NEA is still without a permanent chairperson. The reorganization seems to favor traditional institutional arts over those that are less established, and are being directed by an interim chairwoman. ‘It struck several of us as unusual that an acting chairman would be making what seems to be a comprehensive organizational change when she’s not the chairman. Normally that is something an interim chairman doesn’t do’.” The New York Times 10/05/02

PROPER NOTICE: Do newspaper reviews matter anymore? “There was a time, artistic directors say, when reviews drove the box office. Troupes would add phone staff in the wake of a good review or brace for sparse houses when the notices fell like shards of glass. Those days have changed.” The Star-Tribune (Mpls) 10/06/02

CULTURAL DISTRICT AS HOTEL FOR OUT-OF-TOWNERS: Pittsburgh has a thriving cultural district. But most of what plays there is imported. “The bulk of the Cultural District is a large-scale hotel for outside artists who visit and entertain us before going someplace else. While this allows Pittsburgh to have exposure to a broad range of talent and art forms it might never produce on its own, it does little to foster the local community of professional artists. This means the voice of Pittsburgh is not being heard in its own Cultural District, and the fundamental spirit of local theater culture is to be found only in its smaller companies.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/06/02

Thursday October 3

CULTCHA? IN QUEENS?..WHO KNEW? For artworld denizens of Manhattan, venturing out to Queens has been something of a safari experience. The borough has never been as hip as Williamsburg or other affordable non-Manhattan artist refuges. But the Museum of Modern Art’s temporary move to Long Island City has some Manhattan-bound art lovers considering Queens in a new light. The New York Times 10/03/02

BUT THIS ISN’T BRIBERY, WE SWEAR: The epidemic of touring artists and musicians being denied entry to the U.S. by the Justice Department is reaching crisis proportions, and arts organizations are pleading with Attorney General John Ashcroft to lighten up, to no avail. Now, it appears that part of the problem is a new “expedited” system of visa processing, under which wealthy clients who are willing to kick in $1000 to the government can have their applications pushed through in record time. As a result, the arts groups which previously enjoyed expedited handling as a matter of course are left fuming on the bad side of the money gap. City Pages (Minneapolis/Saint Paul) 10/02/02

DANGLING SOME HOPE IN CLEVELAND: Cleveland, Ohio, boasts one of the world’s great orchestras, and a better-than-average art museum. Other than that, however, the city is pretty much an artistic desert, with some of the lowest arts-funding levels in the nation. This week, Cleveland’s mayor and city council president paid some lip service to the concept of funding the arts, but continued to insist that at the moment, there just isn’t any money available. Furthermore, with statements suggesting that any future funding “must be contingent on showing the public that there will be a return on the investment,” one wonders whether the pols have mistaken the arts for a money-making industry. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 10/03/02

Wednesday October 2

FIGHTING AGAINST THE FUTURE: Major music and movie producers want to preserve their ways of doing business. That means convincing lawmakers to pass laws protecting against technology that can subvert their business models. Dan Gillmor observes that: “the companies that wail about `stealing’ have themselves hijacked billions of dollars worth of literature, music and film from you and me. The public domain hasn’t grown lately, and that’s a betrayal of everyone but the tiny group of mega-companies that owns copyrights to old classics.” San Jose Mercury News 10/01/02

ART OF THE SUBWAY: Cairo’s subway system is polluted, noisy and crowded – not the sort of place anyone would willingly want to spend time. To help make it a little better, “this month the Cairo metro authority opened its halls to the Opera House to display art by local painters and let small orchestras play classical music in a bid to make travel more bearable.” Middle East Times (AFP) 10/01/02

Tuesday October 1

A HISTORY OF INTELLECTUALS IN AMERICA: There was a time – however brief – that being an intellectual was thought to be desirable in America. “During the last 50 years anti-intellectualism has, by and large, disappeared. But then, so have intellectuals, too – well, almost. There have been many important elements of this devolution during the last 50 years.” Chronicle of Higher Education 10/04/02

COMPETING TO REDESIGN LINCOLN CENTER: Lincoln Center chooses five star architects to compete to redesign the performing arts complex’s public plazas. The New York Times 10/01/02

Media: October 2002

Thursday October 31

FRIDA – WHERE’S THE ART? There’s plenty to like about the new Frida Kahlo biopic. But also some serious wrongs. First, where’s her art? Then, “the film unintentionally demeans Kahlo by depicting her as a charming naif, rather than a savvy professional. OK, so she often wore folkloric Tehuana clothes and mimicked folk-art techniques, the better to express her solidarity with working-class Mexicans. But she herself was born bourgeois and was a creature of the international art world besides. Her paintings are far more sophisticated than they initially seem and, even though she downplayed her ambition, she obviously took her work extremely seriously.” Slate 10/30/02

NEWSFLASH – SEX STILL SELLS: The National Organization for Women has released its annual critique of American television, and the landscape has rarely looked bleaker for women who are unfortunate enough not to look like Jennifer Aniston. “The standard for beauty is ‘young, thin and white.’ Only four Asian-American actresses had substantial roles in regularly scheduled series, NOW notes. The networks employed 134 more men than women in recurring prime-time roles.” And the top TV role model for young women isn’t even a human being: she’s crusading cartoon character Lisa Simpson. Denver Post 10/31/02

Wednesday October 30

WHAT’S WRONG WITH ARTS COVERAGE ON THE RADIO: Why is radio afraid to discuss ideas on air? Instead we get artist interviews, process stories and fluff… everything except the ideas. “Free public education is not an elitist concept. And the CBC could be the best public educator in the world, by using experts to explain difficult concepts in everyday language. Most experts on art or ideas are already trained to do this, since they have had to spend some time teaching to make their living. Learning and teaching are inseparable to most thinkers and writers.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/30/02

JESSE HELMS TO THE RESCUE: The North Carolina senator (who’s just about to retire after a 30-years in the Senate) is blocking royalty legislation for webcasters. He says “he believes the discounted record label fees would still be too high for small companies.” Charlotte Observer 10/29/02

REALLY BIG SHOW: Imax theatres are beginning to show digitally remastered prints on their giant screens. The showings are popular, but some critics worry that “if an Imax film, especially the latest Hollywood releases, can be seen at your nearest commercial multiplex, what’s the point in making the trek to the science centre or museum?” Toronto Star 10/30/02

Tuesday October 29

IT’S ABOUT WHO GETS TO CENSOR: Hollywood directors are suing companies who sell software that edits out what they consider offensive scenes. “It’s hard to sympathize with the Directors Guild of America’s efforts to prevent parents from cleaning up movies when it allows studios to do it every day. As long as there’s a buck in it down the line, filmmakers allow studios to reedit their films for TV and airplane broadcast. If studio research numbers come in low, filmmakers willingly change endings, reshoot scenes, tone down sex and violence, cut out entire characters and subplots, and even change the whole tone of a film to make it more commercially salable.” Los Angeles Times 10/29/02

Monday October 28

THE MAN WHO MADE THE MODERN BBC: John Birt is an egoist of the first order. “By the time he retired, he left an organisation that was, if anything, too dominant. Birt had negotiated an above-inflation licence fee settlement for digital channels even before it was clear what they were to be. Extraordinarily, half the money spent on programmes for British television now comes from the BBC. Around two-fifths of all original programming is commissioned and paid for by the licence fee. BBC Worldwide is the country’s largest distributor and exploiter of media intellectual property.” In a new book, Birt tells his story… The Observer (UK) 10/27/02

HOLLYWOOD’S NEW LATIN BEAT: Hispanics are now the largest minority in the United States. “In Los Angeles alone, 47 per cent of the population is Hispanic; that includes five million Mexicans.” And Hollywood is paying attention. The movie industry is increasingly thinking about ways to appeal to Hispanics. “In the last few years, the main thing I’ve observed is a change in attitudes. The business community has realised how important the Latino population is, and movies and TV have started to as well.” The Observer (UK) 10/27/02

FINDING THE REAL FRIDA: How to bring artist Frida Kahlo’s art to the screen? Director Julie Taymor “wanted some way to convey the motivations behind Kahlo’s art, and the device she came up with is what she calls ‘live-action, three-dimensional paintings’ – sequences in which Kahlo’s famous paintings meld with the actors on screen. ‘That makes it a little different than a biopic, because you go in and out of linear storytelling,’ she says.” Washington Post 10/27/02

Sunday October 27

BAD NEWS FOR BRIT FILM: The British film industry is officially in a slump. In the last year, the UK’s Channel Four closed its film production business, and less US investment in British film has resulted in fewer movies being made overall – 40% less than last year, in fact. But the British Film Council is not ready to throw in the towel, and insists that the industry will rebound. BBC 10/25/02

Friday October 25

WHERE’D THE ART GO? Movies have always been entertainment. But also art. “Lately, though, the word ‘art’ is scarcely mentioned in discussions about films in this country, even where you might most expect it, namely independent cinema. The reasons are complex but include the decline of fine art in middle-class life and our love affair with the most trivial aspects of entertainment culture.” San Francisco Chronicle (LAT) 10/25/02

NEW RESPECT FOR BOLLYWOOD? “Although India has a film industry that goes back a century and produces more than 800 films a year, Bollywood filmmakers often complain their work is not taken seriously by either critics or the larger global audience. With their heavy reliance on musical numbers and formulaic plots about star-crossed lovers, popular Indian movies have rarely won critical applause.” But recently Bollywood seems to be winning more respect away from home. What people have become aware of recently is that the way Bollywood deals with similar plot lines is interesting. It has become far more acceptable to think that melodrama is a viable form of art, and not just a failure of art.” National Post 10/25/02

Wednesday October 23

LISTENING TO THE WEB: Most popular TV series are tracked by scores of websites – an official one run by the network; the others run by fans – that dissect the content of every episode. It would be simple to underestimate the intensity with which Web sites fetishize TV programs – and the impact they have on the show’s creators. It is now standard Hollywood practice for executive producers (known in trade argot as ‘show runners’) to scurry into Web groups moments after an episode is shown on the East Coast.” New York Times Magazine 10/20/02

Tuesday October 22

BOLLYWOOD DOWN: India’s Bollywood, home to the largest film industry in the world, has lost $30 million since the beginning of the year. “Both producers and distributors have been hit by the ongoing economic downturn, and that producers have faced falling profits from the sale of music, satellite and overseas rights.” BBC 10/22/02

Monday October 21

ROYALTY PAYMENT DELAY: Small webcasters got an extension on Sunday’s deadline for paying royalty fees for music they stream. “The extension, granted by the recording industry and performance artists Friday, came a day after the Senate recessed for the elections without approving copyright rate revisions negotiated between webcasters and the copyright holders.” The fees will put hundreds of webcasters out of business, the webcasters caim. Nando Times (AP) 10/20/02

INTERACTIVE TV ON YOUR PHONE: “Text messaging has recently overtaken Internet use in Europe. One of the fastest-growing uses of text messaging, moreover, is interacting with television. Figures show that 20% of teenagers in France, 11% in Britain and 9% in Germany have sent messages in response to TV shows.” The Economist 10/18/02

Sunday October 20

WHAT LISTENERS WANT? These days radio is programmed by focus groups and consultants. Radio execs say that what we hear is more in tune with what listeners want than ever before. On the other hand… “radio was once regional, as different as every town. More and more, the whole country is listening to one station … music is something that is magical, ultra-magical, and radio was an art form. Now it’s something cold and different.” Los Angeles Times 10/19/02

WHY TV DRAMAS DON’T AGE WELL: Why is it that “quality” TV dramas that look so real and up-to-date when they first run, look so dated and contrived just a few years later? Part of the answer is technical. ”When drama like this was new, it relied almost totally on words. With the limberness of camerawork and editing today, we rely on a lot of things, not the least of which are elaborate location, costumes, music, and sound effects, things you’re not even aware of and which allows for much more nuanced and subtle acting.” Boston Globe 10/20/02

FITS OF ANALYSIS: What is it about The Sopranos that critics can’t resist? “Never before has a programme been subject to such extensive interpretation. “North American academics have recently published no fewer than five books about The Sopranos. The authors include psychiatrists, sociologists, literary theorists, postmodernists, post-structuralists and the other usual suspects. It’s only fair to warn you that these are determined individuals who will not waste two words when a chapter will do.” The Observer (UK) 10/20/02

Friday October 18

IRANIAN DIRECTOR TURNS BACK AWARD: Iranian film director Bahman Qobadi has rejected an award he was to receive at the Chicago Film Festival after US immigration officials refused to grant him a visa to collect it. “In a letter to the festival organisers, Mr Qobadi said ‘a country which rejects the visa application of an artist, better keep the prize of its festival for its own authorities’.” BBC 10/18/02

VIDEO-ON-DEMAND GOES OFFLINE: Intertainer, the video-on-demand provider, is shutting down while it sues big entertainment companies. “The company said it cannot continue to provide movies and other programming online and on cable systems while entertainment companies raise prices and withhold programs.” Nando Times (AP) 10/17/02

DIGITAL RADIO BLOCKS OUT LITTLE GUYS? Last week the American FCC approved digital radio for US stations. But the way it’s set up is likely to squeeze out small low-wattage community radio stations. Wired 10/18/02

HOW ABOUT SOME UGLY PEOPLE? A researcher in Norway accuses journalists, photographers and TV producers there of “concentrating on beautiful faces and bodies and accuses the press of choosing attractive interviewees from schools or the workplace, and avoiding others. “Ugly people should be spotlighted in the media in the same way that the media wishes to emphasize persons from ethnic minorities.” Aftenposten (Norway) 10/18/02

Thursday October 17

A NOT-FOR-TV EVENT: As far as American TV news is concerned, upcoming elections might as well not be taking place. “Of 2,454 local news programs in the country’s 50 largest media markets, 1,311 contained nothing at all on campaigns between Sept. 18 and Oct. 4, according to the Lear Center Local News Archive.” Nando Times (AP) 10/16/02

WEBCASTER DEAL FALLS APART: Small webcasters thought they had made a deal that would have exempted them from royalty requirements that they say would have forced many of them out of business. But with an October 20th deadline fast coming up, the agreement has fallen apart, and many of the webcasting operations will go silent. “With a new field like Webcasting, it’s hard to tell where the serious concerns end and the panicked hyperbole starts. However, there is evidence that the fear of the July agreement has already dampened what had been a blossoming field.” Boston Globe 10/17/02

AUSSIE FILM EXPERIMENT: Eight films are being shot – all with the same script. “Despite different directors, casts and crews, they are all using the same 10-minute script about two former lovers meeting. One version features deaf actors, another is “a David Lynch nightmare-scape” set in the 1940s, a third was shot in Japanese using train carriages and a fourth has become a tale about schizophrenia. Another, being shot in Bourke next week, has two Aboriginal leads.” Sydney Morning Herald 10/17/02

Wednesday October 16

ON THE FRONT LINES OF PROPAGANDA: These days, Americans tend to view the U.S. propaganda films which aired in movie theatres during World War II as quaint relics of the past. But as the Bush administration cranks up the PR campaign for war against Iraq, the military is once again producing propaganda shorts to air along with previews and pre-screening ads in theatres around the country. The first such film short began airing in select cities this month, with the largest U.S. theatre chain insisting that it is only trying to”‘inform and educate the public.” Los Angeles Times 10/16/02

THE MOVIES YOU’LL NEVER SEE: “Every year, Hollywood studios quietly dump movies — even ones with top stars — that aren’t worth the money to distribute in theaters. Call it Hollywood’s dirty little secret. With marketing costs spiraling higher every year, studios increasingly have both economic and psychological incentives to cut their losses by keeping their stinkers in the closet.” Los Angeles Times 10/16/02

Tuesday October 15

END OF THE VCR: DVD players are the quickest growing consumer device in Australian history. “VCR sales dropped 14 per cent last year but 850,000 units are still expected to sell this year. About 800,000 DVD players are expected to be sold this year. Within four years, VCR sales are expected to dry up.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/15/02

Monday October 14

SANCTIMONY VS. SACRILEGE: The debate between Hollywood directors and the Utah company that is releasing ‘edited’ versions of their films with all the sex, violence, and foul language removed is fast becoming one of those hot-button issues where both sides become so absorbed in their own righteous point of view as to make compromise impossible. To the directors, the old-fashioned folks who just want to enjoy a good flick with their children are ‘fascists’; and to the old-fashioned folks, those Hollywood people are one good full frontal scene from being hard-core pornographers. So where is all this headed? Federal court, of course. Los Angeles Times 10/14/02

PLAYING ALONG: When talking movies first hit theatre screens, 55,000 musicians in the US who had accompanied the silents were thrown out of work within six months. “But some musicians still make a healthy living playing along to old movies at festivals around the world.” BBC 10/14/02

SAG TRIES AGAIN: “The newly elected board of the Screen Actors Guild, seeking to open lines of communication after a three-year battle that ended in defeat for the nation’s talent agencies, on Sunday said it would try to reopen its dialogue with agents over whether to ease restrictions governing their business practices. But there’s a catch. SAG, which represents 98,000 actors, will try to jump-start the talks even though its membership already has said no to the agent’s make-or-break issue: giving agents more leeway to receive investments from and invest in companies that also produce.” Los Angeles Times 10/14/02

Sunday October 13

WHAT WILL DIGITAL SOUND LIKE? This month, the FCC approved the introduction of digital radio signals into the American broadcast landscape, setting off a flurry of predictions, speculations, and warnings over what form the new technology might take. The truth is that digital radio will likely be many things to many people, but anyone looking for it to provide an end to the corporate domination of the airwaves will likely be disappointed. Chicago Tribune 10/13/02

Friday October 11

THE FCC DID WHAT? The two satellite radio companies which have been inundating us with advertising for the last year or two haven’t turned a profit yet, but execs at both Sirius and XM have repeatedly expressed confidence that mass popularity for the medium is only a matter of time. But this week, the FCC has approved plans for existing radio stations to broadcast digital signals (much as TV stations will soon be required to) and the fallout may include the death of satellite radio. Wired 10/11/02

HOLLYWOOD’S OWN MELTING POT: “Many of the great movies that seem to define ‘American’ values have been directed by foreigners, from Yankee Doodle Dandy to Jim Thorpe: All-American. And that isn’t even counting the master himself, Alfred Hitchcock… The flood of talent to Hollywood today hasn’t stopped, it’s just flowing from new directions. In Hollywood’s early years, the directors were Europeans, some of whom were fleeing the Nazis. Today, filmmakers come from Asia and Latin America, too, not to mention English-speaking countries like Australia.” The Christian Science Monitor 10/11/02

Thursday October 10

FILM INSTITUTE MAY CLOSE: The Australian Film Institute is close to closing, after failing to raise enough money to support its operations. “In its 25 years of existence, the Australian Film Institute’s library has played a key role in countless local and international screen projects.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/10/02

SCOTTISH STUDIO IN DOUBT: A study commissioned by the Scottish government concludes there isn’t enough fim work in Scotland to justify building a big new film studio. “Hopes had been raised for a studio after one of the busiest years in the industry – with about 14 productions currently shooting in Scotland.” BBC 10/09/02

Wednesday October 9

GOING DIGITAL? Digital radio could be the biggest update to the medium since the debut of FM in the 1940s. The Federal Communications Commission is to decide Thursday whether to allow radio stations to broadcast digital signals and how they should do it. Digital radio’s rollout could begin in a few months in some major cities, and consumers would start seeing digital receivers in car stereos and high-end audio systems next year.” Wired (AP) 10/08/02

FINAL CUT: Video editing software is sophisticated enough that anyone can now edit TV shows or movies. Legal challenges confront Cleanflicks, a company that edits out scenes it feels are objectionable. But “legal or not, this kind of manipulation is here to stay. It’s not just conservatives in Utah who are taking the knife to films: Enterprising fans are using their computers to alter films, too.” Village Voice 10/08/02

Tuesday October 8

WEBCASTERS MAKE ROYALTY DEAL: Small webcasters may have a deal to lower proposed royalties for songs they stream on the net. Many webcasters had gone silent, complaining that onerous royalty fees would put them out of business. “Sources on both sides of Sunday’s deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it was a two-year agreement that calls for Webcasters to pay back and future royalties equal to 8% to 12% of their revenue or 5% to 7% of their expenses, whichever was higher.” Los Angeles Times 10/07/02

OFFSHORE TRADING: The KaZaA file trading network has something going for it that Napster didn’t – its operator is located outside the United States. “What KaZaA has in the United States are users — millions of them — downloading copyrighted music, television shows and movies 24 hours a day. How effective are United States laws against a company that enters the country only virtually? The answer is about to unfold in a Los Angeles courtroom.” The New York Times 10/07/02

MY BIG FAT RECORD: My Big Fat Greek Wedding has sold $148 million worth of tickets, making it the top-grossing independent film of all time, ahead of The Blair Witch Project. “The film has already outgrossed such mega-budget films as Tom Cruise’s Minority Report, Vin Diesel’s XXX and Hank’s Road to Perdition. Some box-office pundits bet that it will surpass the $200-million mark. And that’s not counting video/DVD sales or the international box-office take.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/08/02

Monday October 7

A HOLLYWOOD DIVIDED: “There’s hardly a cause in the world that isn’t attempting to harness Hollywood’s star power to raise awareness and cash. Yet the question of Israel and whether to wholeheartedly embrace its cause is posing a surprisingly provocative and uncomfortable dilemma for many in the industry, all the more notable because the movie business was founded by and is still well-populated by Jews.” Chicago Tribune (LAT) 10/07/02

HAVE IT YOUR WAY: We’re maybe three years away from having video-on-demand – any movie, anytime, anywhere. “The implications of such a trend: declining influence of the movie-distribution chains that hold sway over when and where new films are released; few video stores outside large urban areas; and dwindling attendances at cinemas everywhere. Cable providers will get their cut in the form of payment for opening their networks to third-party content. Meanwhile, the set-top box will replace the VCR—the greatest single product the consumer-electronics industry ever produced, and one which, at its peak, generated half the industry’s sales and three-quarters of its profits.” Think the cable/movie/TV business is worried? The Economist 10/04/02

FILM’S DEBT TO POLLOCK: The best, most counter-cultural strain of American film-making owes a great deal, perhaps everything, to Jackson Pollock. It is impossible to overstate his importance in American culture. He was the first purely American artist. It took the strange, inarticulate Pollock to break through to something unprecedented. The way he painted – dancing, letting paint fall – was not European. It asserted a freedom, a daring that marks a break in the cultural history of the US.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/07/02

ANTE-DILUVIAN: American syndicated radio host Don Imus daily spews his “anti–gay, anti–black, anti–Asian, anti–Semitic, and sometimes anti–handicapped ridicule” over the airwaves, writes Philip Nobile. So why do prominent members of the American intelligentsia – like New Yorker editor David Remnick – regularly appear as guests on his show? MobyLives 10/07/02

Sunday October 6

FILM MUSEUM WON’T REOPEN: When it opened in 1988, London’s Museum of the Moving Image was “one of the most popular tourist attractions in London, particularly with young visitors.” But it closed down in 1999 for “redevelopment” and now the British Film Institute says it won’t reopen at all. “The future of the museum became bogged down in the redevelopment of the South Bank arts complex, where yet another masterplan has bitten the dust.” The Guardian (UK) 10/05/02

MUSICAL MAKEOVER: There was a time that movie musicals were very popular. Those days are long gone now. So some reinvention is in order. “In the last three years, the salvage operation has become an international project, with directors as dissimilar as Lars von Trier (Danish), Baz Luhrmann (Australian) and most recently François Ozon (French) trotting out ambitious idiosyncratic test models of a new and improved 21st-century movie musical.” The New York Times 10/06/02

Friday October 4

PROTECTING COPYING: Two US Congressmen introduced legislation Thursday that “would legalize the manufacture and use of technology for copying of copy-protected CDs and DVDs for personal use. ‘The anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act unfairly tilts the balance in favor of content owners and away from the consumer, slowly but surely siphoning away the availability of information to which we all have a right’.” Nando Times (Scripps) 10/03/02

EXTRA CREDIT: “The Writers Guild of America has released a set of proposed changes for determining television and screenwriter credits, some of which have already raised the ire of rank and file union members. The four proposed changes, which must be voted on by the Writers Guild’s 12,000 members, were sent out Thursday. Critics say the two most controversial proposals would erode the importance traditionally placed on the first writer of a script.” Los Angeles Times 10/04/02

SCREENWRITER EXTRAORDINAIRE: Harold Pinter is so famous as a playwright that his work for the movies is often overlooked. But Michael Billington is a big fan: “The fact is that he has written 24 screenplays of which, unusually, 17 have been filmed as written. And I would argue that the screenplays not only constitute a significant second canon to the plays, but reveal an even more consistent preoccupation with politics.” The Guardian (UK) 10/04/02

CAN WE KILL OFF PEOPLE’S CHOICE NEXT? The eternal Hollywood question: How many awards shows will the world accept before someone takes Joan Rivers hostage and sets fire to the red carpet? The apparent answer: One fewer than there are now. CBS has announced that the low-rated American Film Institute Awards will not return for a second year. “If there is a lesson from AFI’s experience, it is that… if you plan to broadcast an awards show, you better hope the winners show up.” Los Angeles Times 10/04/02

WATCHING YOU: TV ratings methods are notoriously unreliable. Viewers forget to fill in diaries, and box meters don’t measure who’s there watching. So now there’s the Portable People Meter (PPM), a device about the size of a pager that clips on a belt or can be worn around a person’s neck. Because it is portable, the PPM will capture viewing data that set-top boxes don’t, such as when the person watches the Super Bowl at a sports bar or gets together with friends for a Survivor party.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/03/02

Thursday October 3

TAKING THE CONSUMER’S SIDE: While Microsoft and big chip-makers Intel and AMD are embedding copy protection measures in new products meant to thwart consumer copying, Apple is taking a pro-consumer stand. “The Mac is becoming the hub of a digital lifestyle, in which you move data between a Mac and various devices around the home, such as digital cameras, MP3 players and the like.” San Jose Mercury News 10/02/02

TRYING NOT TO FORGET: Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet presided over one of the most horrific police states of the 20th century, and these days, many Chileans would prefer to forget about those days. But for filmmaker Patricio Guzman, the Pinochet era has become a personal crusade which began when he fled the country following the dictator’s ascension to power. “What shocks me is the lack of space for memory in Latin America. There is no great literature on repression. In Chile great writers have not spoken out… Movie directors turn away from the topic. Most artists feel it is a tired theme. They want to move on, to write about or cover other things. I think we’ll have to wait for those who are 15 now to address this past.” The New York Times 10/03/02

Wednesday October 2

FUN AND GAMES: One of the big promises of digital television was that it would make TV interactive; viewers would be able to tailor their viewing experiences in the ways they wanted. But it hasn’t turned out that way. No surprise – TV is a passive experience, and people seem to like it that way. Instead, the new digital medium is being used for gaming. “Gaming channels have grown wildly popular in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia; South Korea has three, and in the United States, the 24-hour G4 channel was launched in April. What is striking about G4’s offerings is that, belying the cutting-edge nature of the technology it presents, many of its programming formats are utterly traditional.” International Herald Tribune 10/01/02

Tuesday October 1

THE DECLINE OF RADIO? “The consolidation of the radio business in the hands of a very few, powerful corporate owners has devastated the quality of commercial radio. Every year, radio programming is produced with smaller and smaller budgets by fewer and fewer people with more and more smoke and mirrors: cookie-cutter music formats, overuse of syndication, tighter, more repetitive playlists filled with inferior songs, one programming staff operating a cluster of stations and commercial breaks that never seem to end.” Salon 10/01/02

MORE FAKE MOVIE FANS? Are Hollywood movie studios planting e-mail postings to various moviewebsites touting movies they want to promote? The e-mails purport to be from movie fans and talk up upcoming movies in web postings – but in fact they might be planted by the studios. “This is dirty tricks, not legitimate marketing. It’s also a slap in the face because the studios are using our site to hype movies without paying for advertising. After all, what’s the difference between paying people to pretend to be film fans Web sites across the country and paying them to pretend to be happy customers in a testimonial TV commercial?” Los Angeles Times 10/01/02

TV’S NEW AGE OF THE ARTS? “For critics who love the arts, something has gone terribly wrong with arts on television. But in the past year, two remarkable things have happened to shake up this purported decline. The first was the establishment of BBC4, billed as ‘a place to think’ and expressly designed as a haven for intellectual, cultured programming. The second thing was even more radical. In the past year, Channel 5 has unexpectedly moved upmarket, making arts programmes designed to draw in a more upmarket audience.” And audiences are watching. The Guardian (UK) 09/30/02

UNDUE INFLUENCE: Hollywood seems to have an almost supernatural influence over lawmakers in Washington, who have been obediently drafting all manner of legislation that is clearly not in the best interests of consumers. From proposals to allow companies to invade home PCs in search of copyrighted music and movies, to a plan to outlaw analog video equipment (thereby rendering today’s generation of VCR’s unusable), big business is winning. Wired 09/30/02

Publishing: October 2002

Thursday October 31

GEORGE W. BUSH, BOOK CRITIC: The President of the United States apparently has a bit more time on his hands than many people think. According to author and Marine Reserve veteran Gabe Hudson, President Bush was anything but pleased to receive a copy of Hudson’s well-reviewed story collection entitled Dear Mr. President, and sent back a note calling the book “unpatriotic and ridiculous and just plain bad writing.” Hudson further claims that FBI agents have been showing up at his most recent book signings. The White House isn’t commenting. Hartford Courant 10/30/02

THINKING BACK: Sure we’re always hearing buzz about the latest books coming out. But it’s a publisher’s backlist that pays the bills. “Though the definition of where frontlist ends and backlist starts is tough to pin down, the idea of books that have stood the test of time inspires rapturous enthusiasm among independent booksellers, several of whom recently shared their thoughts on this vital category. Selling older titles is profitable and basic to the entire book enterprise.” Publishers Weekly 10/28/02

THE WRITER’S VOICE: “When Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Mantell founded Caedmon Records in 1952, they had little idea their upstart label would develop a back catalogue that included recordings by Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and T.S. Eliot. Fifty years later, original Caedmon LPs have become fetish items for collectors, as many of the existing LPs have been destroyed by school children who have played library copies to inaudibility, and club DJs who use the LPs to pepper their dance tracks with snippets of dialogue.” National Post (Canada) 10/31/02

HAPPY NaNoWriMo! You mean you haven’t started your novel yet? Well, you’d better get cracking – November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, to the cognoscenti,) and if you want to participate, you’ll have thirty days, starting tomorrow, to write 50,000 words that no one outside of your household will likely ever read. Oh, and 6,000 people are said to be participating across the country, so your work had better stand out from a crowd. What’s the point, you say? Oh, c’mon: wouldn’t it feel great to put a check mark next to ‘Write a Novel’ on your great cosmic to-do list? Chicago Tribune 10/31/02

Wednesday October 30

“DIFFICULT” WIN: France’s top literary prize is the Prix Goncourt. It has great prestige but only token monetary value. This year’s winner is Pascal Quignard, who won for a book that critics have described as a “difficult” read. “It’s a sequence of beginnings of novels, stories, landscapes, autobiographical fragments. It’s not a novel or an essay.” BBC 10/29/02

LONGING TO TELL YOU… What’s with all these new extra-long books? The number of 500-page books is growing. “Economic reasons, naturally, play a part in this trend. To publish a long book does not cost much more than to publish one of 300 pages or fewer – perhaps about £5. But the market dictates that you can charge about £20 for a massive volume – and less than half of that for a smaller one. For publishers, booksellers and even writers, the margins on short books look very unappealing.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/30/02

Tuesday October 29

TO BE CANADIAN (SAY IT PROUD): Canadians seem to be scooping up all the big international literary prizes these days. Canadians themselves seem a little dazed by all the attention, but there’s no denying that Canadian literature now has cachet. How did Canada grow its crop of prominent writers? MobyLives 10/29/02

POETS LAUREATE – PRACTICING WITH AN EXPIRED LICENSE? Current controversies over American state poets laureate are a bit embarrassing. But hey, poets live messy lives, and besides, ”it has sparked the kind of controversy that allows people to have opinions about something they never knew existed in the first place. Maybe people will even care to have an opinion, and that’s a good thing.” Boston Globe 10/29/02

RESCUING WRITERS: The Australia Council has a program for “eminent” writers to “rescue” them from financial hardship. The program gives $80,000 each to authors who have “published at least four works, regardless of age, and must ‘dazzle’ the board with their literary merit, critical recognition and contribution to Australian literature. Eighty-one writers received grants totalling $1.94 million, out of a record 543 applicants.” Sydney Morning Herald 10/29/02

A GOOD MAD-ON: Mad Magazine is 50 and a cultural icon. Okay, so its circulation peaked in 1974 at 2.8 million and is now averaging about 250,000 each month. But Mad was father (or at least wierd uncle) to a whole generation of ironic, sarcastic humor. Funny, its style is so pervasively reflected throughout modern North American culture it’s difficult to remember pre-Mad times. Toronto Star 10/29/02

Monday October 28

SUING THE PATRIOT ACT: A coalition of free-speech groups have sued the US Justice Department over the Patriot Act. “The Patriot Act, passed in October of 2001, allows the seizing of records from institutions like libraries and bookstores even in situations where criminal activity is not suspected. It also imposes a gag order that prevents those who records have been seized from reporting what happened. The suit seeks certain pieces of what it describes as generic information, such as how many times the act has been used and against what kind of establishments. It does not seek to uncover what was revealed in these seizures.” Publishers Weekly 10/24/02

MARTEL’S ‘OVERNIGHT’ SUCCESS: Last week Yann Martel won the Booker Prize. Not many had heard of him before that. He got only a $20,000 for Canadian rights to Life of Pi, US$75,000 for US rights and was turned down by five UK publishers before getting $36,000 for the UK rights from a struggling publisher. For four years those advances were his only income. “I could only do it because I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t have a car. I have roommates. I wear second-hand clothes. I have no TV. I have no stereo. My only expenses are my notebooks and my computer.” National Post (Canada) 10/28/02

Sunday October 27

THE MAKING OF A COUP: When the wildly unorthodox process that led to the selection of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi as winner of this year’s Booker Prize came to light last weekend, the spotlight was thrown onto Professor Lisa Jardine, who may just have transformed the prize forever. “Every coup is part cock-up, part conspiracy. For the suits of Booker, the biggest cock-up was that, in the echo chamber of the British Museum, their proprietory rhetoric was inaudible. No one paid any attention. So when Harvey McGrath of the Man Group delivered the coup de grâce, establishing the Man Group’s control of the prize in a few silkily lethal sentences, Booker’s ancien régime was already mortally wounded.” The Observer (UK) 10/27/02

  • THE TRAPPINGS OF FAME: So what will Yann Martel’s Booker win do for his career? Certainly, sales of his prize-winning book will skyrocket, but in the long term, many serious authors have found fame to be as much a hindrance as a help. Norman Mailer once claimed that his celebrity “ripped my former identity from me,” and damaged his ability to work. The Telegraph (UK) 10/26/02

TRIAGE AMONGST THE STACKS: It’s the hardest part of any librarian’s job, and there are many who think it shouldn’t be done at all. But with space at a premium in nearly every library, the process known as ‘weeding’ has become an essential, if painful one. Which books to keep, and which to discard? Should lack of recent readership banish a book from its space, or should decisions be made based on quality, as determined by ‘experts’? The debate goes on. The New York Times 10/26/02

Friday October 25

REJECTING A WINNER: Yann Martel’s Life Of Pi won the Booker Prize this week. But when he was looking for a publisher, five top London firms turned him down. “It is embarrassing for the editors concerned. I understand how they must be feeling today. But you know, this sort of thing happens all the time with serious fiction in particular, where taste and sensibility are what matters. Of course, it is very gratifying when your own judgment and belief in a book’s greatest proves correct.” The Guardian (UK) 10/24/02

Thursday October 24

ARE WRITERS THE NEW POP STARS? “There’s a sense among young people and those who make it that fiction can be central to the culture. There was a conventional wisdom among the older generations that it was a marginalized endeavor. To see it be a central cultural product for kids today, that’s all to the good. The only caveat is the problems that being a rock star or any kind of celebrity sensation presents.” New York Observer 10/23/02

HANDICAPPING THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS: This year’s National Book Award fiction list “lacks not only a clear favorite, but also a controversial anti- favorite—think In America, by Susan Sontag, in 2000—that could provide what contest-watchers live for: a big fat upset. Publicly, publishers say nothing but nice things about the nominated titles. Privately, they bicker and bitch about who’s been excluded. And who came blame them?” New York Observer 10/23/02

THANK GOD FOR THE BOOKER: “With a Canadian author walking away with this year’s prestigious Booker Prize and another two short-listed, the country’s hard hit publishers said on Wednesday they were are only too happy for some deserving international attention… Canada’s publishing industry, which has long been supported by the government, has had a tough year after suffering a bankruptcy of one of its major houses, General Publishing Company.” Yahoo! News (Reuters) 10/23/02

  • MARTEL MADNESS: Canadian booksellers are reporting a mad rush on Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which was announced this week as the winner of the prestigious Booker Prize. Sales are particularly brisk in Montreal, where several of the city’s largest bookstores have been unable to keep the title in stock. Montreal Gazette 10/24/02
  • PLOT OF PI: So, now that the Booker has been awarded, and the gushing has begun anew over the talent of young Yann Martel, what about the book itself? Where did it come from, and where does it take the reader? According to Martel himself, the genesis of the idea came from a scene in a Brazilian novel of Jews escaping Nazi Germany, and fleshed itself out during the author’s travels in India into “a novel which will make you believe in God’ — or ask yourself why you don’t.” National Post (Canada) 10/24/02

SEBOLD’S SUCCESS: The publishing industry, like most entertainment cultures, does not like surprises. The best-sellers are supposed to be written by brand-name authors and fluffed up by expensive marketing campaigns. But once every few years, a book manages to break through the PR wall and sell like gangbusters simply because, well, it’s a great book. Enter Alice Sebold, and her self-made bestseller The Lovely Bones. Washington Post 10/24/02

Wednesday October 23

MARTEL WINS BOOKER – AGAIN: Canadian writer Yann Martel has won this year’s Booker Prize. He quickly denied that the fact that three Canadian writers made the Booker shortlist consituted a literary movement. “It’s happenstance that there’s three Canadian writers.” This is actually Martel’s second time winning the booker in the past week. Last week the Booker website briefly declared him the winner; that announcement was dismissed as an error by Booker judges. BBC 10/23/02

  • THINKING ABOUT CANADIAN WRITING: Martel’s book was greeted with good but not great reviews in Canada, but was an instant hit with British critics. “I hope this award will encourage us to think of Canadian literature in a different light, to respond more positively to adventurous, playful, yet intellectually serious strains of writing.” Toronto Star 10/23/02
  • O CANADA: “Canada, a country with no Robert Burns or Robert Louis Stevenson in its young literary history, may be the very model of how a nation can actively create and encourage an outstandingly strong book industry, with all the socio-economic benefits which flow from that, never mind the benefits to the heart, soul and grateful mind. Canadian investment in literature comes from various sources, national and provincial.” The Scotsman 10/23/02

CALIFORNIA POET LAUREATE RESIGNS AFTER LIE: Quincy Troupe, California’s first poet laureate, who was appointed last June, has resigned after it was discovered he had lied on his official resume. “His curriculum vitae says he graduated from college, but he didn’t. Troupe, a professor of creative writing and American and Caribbean literature at the University of California at San Diego, is author of 13 books, including six books of poetry. ‘He was extremely popular. His work was fantastic. He was loved among his students. It’s a shame’.” Yahoo! (AP) 10/19/02

  • A LIFE UNRAVELING: The revelation could jeopardize Troupe’s post at UCSD, where he has taught since 1991, because it constitutes a violation of the faculty code of conduct.” San Francisco Chronicle 10/21/02
  • THE PERILS OF POET LAUREATES: As the states of New Jersey and California have recently found out, hiring a poet is not a benign act. “Some are prone to confuse the prophetic with extravagant foolishness. Many believe that the ecstatic and the orgiastic are subjects just as suitable as the edifying. Some are sinister fools. Many others are in the process of living the same sort of messy, contradictory lives as everyone else – though usually more poetically.” Los Angeles Times 10/23/02

DISCOVERING HEMMINGWAY: Last March, in a small house in Cuba, “a delegation of four Americans found what they described as a jackpot: file cabinets and boxes filled with thousands of pages of Hemingway’s original manuscripts, rough drafts and outtakes from great works, handwritten letters of love and anger, notes in English and Spanish, and thousands of photographs.” The trove should reveal much about the last third of the writer’s life. San Francisco Chronicle 10/23/02

LISTENING TO THE PRINTED WORD: Why do people flock to author readings? They can, after all, cut out the middleman and simply read the book. The International Festival of Authors in Toronto is stuffed full of author readings. “You come to hear the ur-voice. To hear authors talks about the work, where it comes from, how it was made. That and the chance to actually shake the hand of the person who’s work you’ve admired. One of the things you can do here that you can’t do at a film or music festival is actually shake the hands of the stars.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/23/02

Tuesday October 22

A TRADITIONAL GG: Canada’s Governor General Book Award finalists were announced Monday. There were no first-time authors, no edgy, risky new voices on the fiction list. The shortlist includes The Case of Lena S. by David Bergen (M & S), Exile by Ann Ireland (Simon & Pierre), The Navigator of New York by Giller nominee Wayne Johnston (Knopf), A Song for Nettie Johnson by Gloria Sawai (Coteau) and Unless by Carol Shields (Random House), who is also a finalist for the Booker and the Giller. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/22/02

  • SHIELDS’ HAT TRICK: With the Governor General’s nomination, “Carol Shields’ novel Unless, about a family’s agony when a daughter opts to live on the street for no apparent reason, is also a finalist for the $25,000 Giller Prize and for the $120,000 Man Booker prize, to be announced in London tonight.” Toronto Star 10/22/02
  • WHAT’S CANADIAN? Three Canadian books made this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. But is there anything that’s distinctly Canadian about them? “Merely posing the question – Is there such a thing as a Canadian style? – betrays the sort of provincialism these Canadian authors and books so forcefully reject. There is no writing that is identifiably Canadian because what is distinct about the literature coming from there is its diversity.” Calgary Herald 10/22/02

AN EIGHTH HARRY POTTER? JK Rowling has always said that there would be seven Harry Potter books. But Warner Brothers has copyrighted not only the next three titles, but a fourth as well. “The new titles are book five (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) plus Harry Potter and the Pyramids of Furmat, Harry Potter and the Chariots of Light and Harry Potter and the Alchemist’s Cell.” The Scotsman 10/21/02

  • NO EIGHTH HARRY: JK Rowling’s agent has denied there are any plans for an eighth Harry Potter. “There is absolutely no truth in the story that either there is going to be an eighth book in the series or that these titles are genuine title for the sixth and seventh books.” BBC 10/22/02

SCOTLAND ABANDONS NATIONAL LIT CENTER IDEA: The Scottish government has ditched a £2 million plan for an expansion of the National Library to turn it into a National Literary Center. “The aim was to provide a ‘national information and literary centre’ by giving the library the space it needs to expand, and at the same time bringing in other organisations such as the Edinburgh Book Festival to promote books and internet learning.” The Scotsman 10/15/02

Monday October 21

THE NYer’S NEW FICTION EDITOR: Deborah Treisman, a “32-year-old prodigy little known outside the literary world,” has been named the new fiction editor of the The New Yorker magazine, succeeding Bill Buford in one of the most important fiction editing jobs in the literary world. “I suppose it is not wrong to say that that I am interested in younger, more experimental, edgier voices.” The New York Times 10/21/02

WHOSE BACKLASH IS IT ANYWAY? Is a backlash forming against today’s young trendy literary writers? The signs are all there. But look a little closer – the ” ‘backlash’ being forecast is against a group of writers who started by exploiting a ‘backlash’ of their own devising.” MobyLives 10/21/02

Sunday October 20

DO LIT PRIZES MATTER? They generate lots of publicity. But do literary prizes really make a difference to the world of letters? “Yes, say leading literary professionals, who believe such awards not only carry commercial weight, but also play an increasingly important role in connecting serious writers with readers eager for qualitative road signs in a world awash in books.” Los Angeles Times 10/19/02

BAD WAY TO CHOOSE: Lisa Jardine, the chair of the panel of judges for this year’s Booker Prize says the way novels are chosen for consideration of one of the world’s major literary awards is outdated and she “accused the head of the prize of having an outdated corporate agenda.” She says “that the current crop of 130 books – two submitted by every publisher – was too large” and that “the judges were prevented from making the best decision by the sheer number of books they had to read.” The Observer (UK) 10/20/02

  • CHANGING OF THE GUARD: This year’s Booker jury piles into cabs and rides the London Eye to check a plot point. The ascent of Lisa Jardine as jury chair was, “symbolically, the moment a stuffy old literary prize was dragged into the twenty-first century, the moment when old-fashioned literary critical discourse was replaced by publicity-conscious British empiricism. This, far more than the springtime media flap about the opening of the prize to American competition, is the real, rather overlooked, story of the 2002 Booker prize.” The Observer (UK) 10/20/02
  • ALL THINGS BOOKER: For some writers, winning the Booker Prize (the winner of which is to be announced Tuesday) is the difference between being able to earn a living as a writer or not. This is the Year of the Canadian, with three of the six finalists coming from the Frozen North. It’s difficult to overstate the Booker’s effect on a career. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/19/02

THE DAVE EGGERS PUZZLE: Dave Eggers’ new book is being self-published and he’s giving away the money earned from it. With the success of his last book he could have done anything he wanted. “He’s so averse to promoting himself that it is the canniest act of self-promotion. He really doesn’t care – really. But that’s hard for anyone in the frenzy business to believe.” Los Angeles Times 10/20/02

Friday October 18

BOOK GLUT WARNING: Each year publishers release many of the biggest books in time for the holiday season; it is, after all, the time when most books are sold. But “this year the stream of titles from the publishing houses has become a flood, provoking booksellers to warn that some high-quality titles are at risk of being drowned.” The Independent (UK) 10/17/02

Thursday October 17

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTS ANNOUNCED: Nominees include “You Are Not a Stranger Here,” a debut story collection by Adam Haslett, “Big If,” by Mark Costello; Julia Glass’ “Three Junes”; Brad Watson’s “The Heaven of Mercury”; and “Gorgeous Lies,” by Martha McPhee, daughter of the award-winning essayist John McPhee.” Nando Times (AP) 10/16/02

  • OOPS – MARTEL WINS THIS YEAR’S BOOKER – A WEEK EARLY: This year’s Booker Prize winner will be announced next week. But due to a mixup on the Booker website, a notice announcing that Yann Martel has won was posted. A booker spokesperson rushes to assure one and all that the winner isn’t really known yet. “The judges haven’t met yet. I can guarantee that this isn’t the actual result. There are six draft press releases for each of the shortlisted books and this is one of them.” The Guardian (UK) 10/17/02

REBUILDING THE GREAT LIBRARY: The Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed 1,500 years ago. “The original great library’s collection of some 700,000 papyrus scrolls, including works by Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles represented the first time knowledge was collected and codified by scribes.” Now it’s been rebuilt The £130m project was initiated more than a decade ago, amid high hopes that the Biblioteca Alexandrina would recapture the spirit of the city’s ancient seat of learning.” But “the new library is riven with dispute over what its content should be. Egypt’s fondness for censorship has meant that rows have already erupted over its book collection policy.” The Guardian (UK) 10/16/02

THE CASE FOR N JERSEY’S POET LAUREATE: New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka is almost certain to be removed from the job because of a controversial poem he wrote about 9/11 that is being called anti-Semitic. “The issue is ultimately one of tolerance of diverse opinion. The left gave us political correctness in the early 1990’s, and now those processes of enforcing orthodoxy have been inherited by the right and the mainstream. And the heretics only happen to be talking about the most important international questions of our time.” New York Observer 10/16/02

BOOKS FOR THE BLIND: A new law in Britain allows copies of books to be made for the blind without breaching copyright. “Only five per cent of titles published each year in the UK are currently accessible to Britain’s visually impaired people via Braille or large print.” The Scotsman 10/17/02

PUBLISH YOURSELF: Print-on-demand books are becoming popular with authors who can’t find a traditional publisher. “On-demand books are a new wrinkle in the concept of vanity publishing, in which a vanity press typically prints many copies of the book at once (and generally the author has to pay for them). Since print-on-demand publishers only issue books as needed, costs are lower and the author can even make a little money in royalties.” The New York Times 10/17/02

BUFORD TO LEAVE NYer EDITOR JOB: Bill Buford, who has been The New Yorker’s fiction editor since 1994, is leaving the job to be the magazine’s European correspondent. “In a way, it’s going from the best editing job in town to the best writing job in town-except it’s not in town.” New York Observer 10/16/02

Wednesday October 16

MR BOOKS: Martin Goff runs the Man Booker Prize. He’s also the printed word’s biggest advocate in the UK. “What distinguishes Goff from the other Hooray Henries around St James’s Square is his quixotic quest to get the philistine British to buy good novels. Selling double glazing to Afghans is child’s play by comparison.” Now “there are rumours that Goff is about to retire from masterminding the Man Booker prize. It will be a sad day.” The Guardian (UK) 10/16/02

FRANKFURT REBOUND: “Last year… there was an eerie pall over the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, a gathering of book industry professionals that has been going on since the mid-15th Century, shortly after Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type… But this year, in spite of the rumors of war, the collapse of the economy in important book markets such as Argentina (where 700 bookstores closed in the last three years), and the lingering effects of Europe’s switch to the more expensive Euro, the Frankfurt Book Fair — the largest market for international rights in the world — was bustling.” Chicago Tribune 10/16/02

MORE AMBROSE DEBATE: Some critics felt that obituaries of the historian Stephen Ambrose glossed over reports of his plagiarism, but Tim Rutten detected the opposite bias, singling out the Boston Globe as the most egregious Ambrose-basher, and pointing out that paraphrase (and footnoted paraphrase, at that) is very different from plagiarism. “All synoptic, narrative historians, which is what Ambrose was, paraphrase from other sources. If the standards laid down by his most rabid critics were applied to the four Evangelists, the three Synoptic Gospels would have to be denounced as acts of plagiarism–as would a substantial and revered part of the extant medieval corpus.” Los Angeles Times 10/16/02

Tuesday October 15

LUV ME, YA DUMMY: Who like to be insulted? And yet “publishers continue to appeal to potential book-buyers by labelling them dummies and complete idiots. And they’ve struck paydirt in the process.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/15/02

MAKING SENSE: Is literary criticism in need of some organizing principles? “It may be that much literature makes sense in the light of the current warhorses of critical analysis: Marx, Freud, textualism, postmodernism, ‘queer theory,’ and so forth. But it is equally likely that a good deal of literature (just as life itself) makes more sense in the light of evolution. Accordingly, literary critics might well profit by adding Darwinian analysis to their armamentarium.” Chronicle of Higher Education 10/14/02

THE HISTORICAL RECORD: Where is the intellectual rigor in today’s historical fiction? “That some of today’s historical novelists are talented is obvious, but equally obvious is the fact that they don’t want to aggressively interrogate the historical record in any new ways, or challenge their readers’ assumptions about how we imagine the past.” MobyLives 10/14/02

THE HIDDEN AMBROSE: Why did obituaries of author Stephen Ambrose gloss over his plagiarism? “Ambrose’s pilferage was much more than a slip-up in a ‘couple of books.’ As the Weekly Standard, Forbes.com, and New York Times proved in one damning week last January, Ambrose plagiarized all the time.” Slate 10/14/02

Monday October 14

FIGHTING IN PUBLIC: A public and rancorous debate is being carried out in public among two of England’s better known public intellectuals. “The debate is particularly English because its protagonists — the novelist Martin Amis and the Washington-based writer Christopher Hitchens — are so rooted in late 20th-century London. Both graduated from Oxford University and have carried out their quarrel in learned texts freckled with Latin. Both won renown while working at the leftist New Statesman in the 1970’s. Each had no cross word — in public at least — for the other. Until last month.” The New York Times 10/14/02

THE POISON REVIEW: You spend years researching and writing a scolarly book and then a prominent literary review sends it out to a “demon reviewer whose solitary aim is to make mincemeat of you in public. There is, of course, no row like an academic row… The Guardian (UK) 10/11/02

  • Previously: CROSSFIRE: There are bad reviews. And then there are bad reviews. Jason Cowley writes that literary London is wincing at a whomping of “perhaps unprecedented hostility and malice” in the Times Literary Supplement of noted Russian scholar Orlando Figes’ new book, Natasha’s Dance, “a broad, sweeping, multidisciplinary cultural history of Russia.” Moscow-based, British academic Rachel Polonsky’s review “cites among her charges against him factual inaccuracies, misreadings, cavalier appropriation of sources and overall intellectual irresponsibility. There are even suggestions, if not of plagiarism, which remains the cardinal crime in academe, then of careless paraphrase.” The Guardian (UK) 10/03/02

WANTING WOMEN: “Women’s magazines are in a state of flux. Two high profile titles (Elle and She) closed earlier this year, and most of the others are in decline. As a result, most of the mass market major titles including Woman’s Day, New Idea, and marie claire have been changing their formula to save themselves from extinction.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/14/02

ARCHER ESCAPES PUNISHMENT: Writer, former MP (and convicted felon) Jeffrey Archer has escaped punishment for breaking prison rules and publishing a diary he wrote while in his cell. “Archer, 62, had his £12-a-day prison earnings stopped for 14 days and was banned from using the prison canteen for two weeks. The punishment was suspended for six months” if Archer doesn’t break the rules again. The Times (UK) 10/11/02

  • ARCHER’S BANAL DIARY: What about Archer’s “literary” impressions of prison life? “Completely worthless from the literary point of view, and relentlessly banal in thought, observation and analysis, they are nonetheless revealing: of Lord Archer’s mind and personality rather than of the prison system. And to be privy to Archer’s mind in full cry is a depressing experience indeed.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/14/02
  • Previously: LETTER FROM PRISON: Jeffrey Archer’s diary from prison describing his life there is being published and serialized in the Daily Mail next week. But prison authorities say the diary may break prison rules. “He can’t make money while he is a serving prisoner from publications and I have a duty to protect the privacy of other prisoners and members of staff. He has to respect that.” If he has broken rules, time may be added to his sentence. The Guardian (UK) 10/05/02

Sunday October 13

STEPHEN AMBROSE, 66: Stephen Ambrose, the eminent historian whose colloquial style made him a bestselling author as well as a respected researcher, has died at the age of 66 after a long battle with lung cancer. Ambrose had lately been battling charges of plagiarism in several of his works. The New York Times (AP) 10/13/02

PRODUCT PLACEMENT OR HACK-FOR-HIRE? Audiences have long since gotten used to the endless and gratuitous product placements used in movies and television shows to generate extra revenue with very little extra effort. But now, an even more insidious form of message imbedding has come to the world of books: “Two entrepreneurial exiles from Britain’s advertising universe are venturing boldly and unapologetically into this once-forbidden territory. They propose to write fiction for organizations and institutions that want their message communicated. Never mind the niceties of plot, theme and character development; let’s just turn literature into another marketing opportunity, of which the Western world is so clearly bereft.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 10/12/02

Friday October 11

PORTER COMES FORWARD: Peter Porter has won poetry’s biggest award – the £10,000 Forward Poetry prize. “After the acrimony of many recent poetry prizes, last night’s was a unanimous decision by the judges, for Porter’s latest collection, Max is Missing. William Sieghart, the chairman, described him as one of the most distinguished poets working in Britain – where he has lived since he left Australia 50 years ago.” The Guardian (UK) 10/10/02

Thursday October 10

KERTESZ WINS NOBEL: A Hungarian novelist whose works draw their dark inspiration from the author’s own days in two Nazi death camps has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Imre Kertesz was lauded by the Swedish Academy for “exploring how individuals can survive when subjected to ‘barbaric’ social forces.” BBC 10/10/02

GHOSTWRITTEN NOBEL? One of Spain’s most distinguished writers – Nobel winner Camilo Jose Cela – has been accused of “regularly using ghostwriters for most of his career. The allegations… include not just the recent works of Cela, who died in January at 85 and won his Nobel in 1989, but stretch back to his early classics.” The Guardian 10/09/02

ATWOOD SUES GLOBE: The Toronto Globe & Mail is being sued for libel by famed Canadian author Margaret Atwood, after the newspaper supposedly singled out Atwood as one of the more prominent signers of a strongly worded petition opposing American President George W. Bush’s plans to invade Iraq. Atwood did sign the petition, along with about 130 other Canadian artists, authors, and celebrities, but she claims that the Globe associated her with comments made at the press conference announcing the petition (notably one referring to the American administration as a group of thugs,) a press conference she did not attend. National Post (Canada) 10/10/02

Wednesday October 9

OUSTING THE POET: The New Jersey State Legislature has been working on a resolution to oust state poet laureate Amiri Baraka after Baraka read a poem suggesting that Israelis might have had something to do with the attack on the World Trade Center. Though he can’t fire Baraka, NJ Gov. James E. McGreevey “stopped payment on the $10,000 state grant Baraka was to have received as the state’s honorary poet laureate.” Newark Star-Ledger 10/08/02

SECOND CHANCES: Today’s publishing climate exerts huge pressure on writers to hit big out of the gate. And even greater pressure to follow up with another success. There’s little patience for stumbles. But “Second-Novel Syndrome has long been an occupational hazard in the world of letters, as authors struggle with writer’s block, intense scrutiny, and the self-consciousness induced by sudden celebrity.” Village Voice Literary Supplement 10/08/02

BOOKS ON WHEELS: The Internet Bookmobile is making its way across America “stopping at schools, museums and libraries, making books for kids and spreading the word about the digital library that is the Net.” It’s a “1992 Ford Aerostar equipped with mobile satellite dish, duplexing color printer, desktop binding machine and paper cutter. A sign on the outside says, “1,000,000 books inside (soon).” The van will end its cross-country trek today, parking outside the US Supreme Court, while the future of copyright law is argued inside. Salon 10/09/02

RISK-FREE: Have poets stopped experimenting with language? “Every age has its risks, innovators, uncontainable oddballs, but the 20th is the century in which experiment became the central fetish of artistic production. It may be that the recent spate of proclamations that modernism’s not dead yet, please, isn’t simply a holding action by the Citizens for Endowed Chairs for Modernists, but a recognition that we haven’t managed to come up with a criterion beyond experimentation (though raw marketability seems to have done well in the fine arts).” Village Voice Literary Supplement 10/08/02

BACK TO TELL ABOUT IT: “Gabriel García Márquez, the 1982 Nobel laureate from Colombia and the foremost author in Latin America, learned in 1999 that he had lymphatic cancer. He promptly cloistered himself with a single-minded pursuit not seen perhaps since he wrote the 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, in a little more than a year, his only vice a steady supply of cigarettes provided by his wife, Mercedes.” Now he’s about to release “what may be his most-awaited book, Vivir Para Contarla, or To Live to Tell It.” The New York Times 10/09/02

CROSSFIRE: There are bad reviews. And then there are bad reviews. Jason Cowley writes that literary London is wincing at a whomping of “perhaps unprecedented hostility and malice” in the Times Literary Supplement of noted Russian scholar Orlando Figes’ new book, Natasha’s Dance, “a broad, sweeping, multidisciplinary cultural history of Russia.” Moscow-based, British academic Rachel Polonsky’s review “cites among her charges against him factual inaccuracies, misreadings, cavalier appropriation of sources and overall intellectual irresponsibility. There are even suggestions, if not of plagiarism, which remains the cardinal crime in academe, then of careless paraphrase.” The Guardian (UK) 10/03/02

  • TAKING FIGES APART: Read Polonsky’s dissection of Figes’ book. Times Literary Supplement 10/04/02

Tuesday October 8

ALD – R.I.P: The popular website Arts & Letters Daily has shut down. Editor Denis Dutton has updated the site for the past year after parent company Lingua Franca went out of business. ALD and the rest of Lingua Franca‘s assets will be auctioned off in bankruptcy, but loyal ALD readers aren’t out of luck. Dutton has moved on to Philosophy & Literature, where’s he’s recreated the ALD idea. National Post 10/08/02

PAYBACK: Dave Eggers could have chosen any big publisher to produce his latest book. But he’s self publishing and distributing it through independent bookstores. For Eggers and his magazine McSweeney’s, it’s a way of rewarding those who have helped them. “Almost all small publishers depend on the support of independent bookstores. McSweeney’s books have always been sold primarily in independent bookstores, and not by choice. Typically, the chains do not order many copies of our books, leaving most of the sales to the independent stores. Therefore, we always give independent stores first dibs on our books.” Chicago Tribune 10/08/02

SERIOUS READING: Many American magazines have been struggling as the economy has worsened. But more serious magazines have seen their circulations increase significantly. Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly and The New Republic are newly thriving. “When everyone is feeling that the only important thing in life is the next Lexus and worship CEOs as demigods, there is little appetite for ideas or good writing, which is what our magazines are about. But the fact remains that you can get more out of good writing than you can from a 500-channel television universe that inevitably dissolves into incoherence. Writing involves thought and creates coherence, which is an appealing commodity in this atmosphere of concern.” Los Angeles Times 10/04/02

SEARCHING FOR SUBSTANCE: Writer Jonathan Franzen is back with a new book – a collection of essays that seems to be winning back some of the fans he lost last year in L’affaire Oprah. This is a serious series of writing, in which Franzen “fears that if there ever was an average American reader there no longer is, and, what is worse, that the ranks of serious readers are growing ever thinner.” Chicago Sun-Times 10/06/02

  • BACK ON FRANZEN’S SIDE: “To read How to Be Alone is to see how the awkward parting of Franzen and [Oprah] Winfrey dramatized the lopsided war between the idea-mongering minority and the image-peddling majority in American culture. It is also to wish that intelligence were more fashionable.” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 10/07/02

Monday October 7

BOOK WORLD CONVENES IN FRANKFURT: The annual Frankfurt Book Fair begins this week “with more than 6,000 exhibitors representing 110 countries, hosting more than 2,600 events and 800 readings and interviews with authors. Although the number of countries and publishers is 5 percent lower this year than last year, the Frankfurt Book Fair remains the largest fair of its kind in the world. The most notable absentees are from the host country itself, with almost 15 percent fewer German publishers reserving space this year.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10/04/02

PUBLISHING’S GOLDEN AGE: Down with the pessimists, writes Toby Mundy. “With its over-educated, overworked, underpaid legions, publishing is an industry bedevilled by pessimism. This pessimism blinds people to the fact that we are living in a golden age of book publishing in which quantity and quality rival anything in the past, in which books have never been so well published and in which they occupy a more boisterously visible place in the general culture than ever before.” Prospect 10/02

  • IN PRAISE OF PAPER: Will electronic publishing kill books? “The first steps of electronic publishing have been faltering. The e-book has not – yet – been a bestseller, or even a viable commercial proposition. One day, however, such ventures will succeed and when electronic publishing becomes the norm, the more desirable (and expensive) the traditional book will correspondingly become.” The Observer (UK) 10/06/02

WRITING ABOUT A LAND OF VIOLENCE: Since the 1980s, thousands of Zimbabwe’s writerrs journalists and artists who have criticized Robert Mugabe’s government have been “harassed, arrested and jailed.” And yet, some of the country’s most prominent writers tell the story of Zimbabwe’s political violence. “I wanted to say, This is how it was. Just that. These destructive people were created, and they roamed the land. I cannot pretend to have been unaware of the relevance now. We weren’t past this violence; we have remained in that.” The New York Times 10/07/02

Sunday October 6

IT WAS A DARK! AND STORMY! NIGHT! A Canadian publisher specializes in the early literary efforts of star writers – books they wrote when they 17 or 18. What’s the point? Some of the writing is enough to make you wince. But “look, there are things like bad spelling and lousy punctuation. Those things make you wince. But these books teach us about a writer’s recurring themes, their evolving techniques and skills. They teach us more about the evolution of these great talents.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/05/02

WHY DO WE NEED A RHYMER-IN-CHIEF? Forty US states have poets laureate. Most (none?) have been controvesial in the way that New Jersey’s Amiri Baraka has. The controversy over New Jersey’s poel laureate leads one critic to wonder – why should there even be poets laureate? Philadelphia Inquirer 10/05/02

LETTER FROM PRISON: Jeffrey Archer’s diary from prison describing his life there is being published and serialized in the Daily Mail next week. But prison authorities say the diary may break prison rules. “He can’t make money while he is a serving prisoner from publications and I have a duty to protect the privacy of other prisoners and members of staff. He has to respect that.” If he has broken rules, time may be added to his sentence. The Guardian (UK) 10/05/02

Friday October 4

SURPRISING SHORTLIST: “The shortlist of a major prize is notable as much for what is not on it as for what is. So it is this year for the ninth annual Giller Prize for fiction, whose nominees were announced yesterday at a news conference in Toronto. On the 2002 shortlist are authors Carol Shields (Unless), Austin Clarke (The Polished Hoe), Wayne Johnston (The Navigator of New York), Bill Gaston (Mount Appetite) and Lisa Moore (Open). “Surprising” and “controversial” were just some of the adjectives circulating among the crowd at the posh downtown Toronto hotel ballroom after this year’s panel of judges… presented a shortlist of five for the $25,000 prize. The winner of what has been described as both the most prestigious honour and best marketing/promotion tool in English-Canadian literature is to be named at a gala banquet Nov. 5.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 10/04/02

  • GILLER IN PERSPECTIVE: “We in the book chat business must face it. The announcement of the short list for the Giller Prize, and the arguments over which novels should be on that list, are small potatoes compared to the blazing controversy over the proper salary for [Hockey Night in Canada presenter] Ron MacLean.” But like any other contest with national implications, the Giller is a fascinating glimpse into the world of writers and publishers, and the politics of the thing alone are enough to fascinate any observer. Toronto Star 10/04/02

RADICAL CRITIQUE: BR Myers is back with an expanded complaint about the quality of contemporary fiction. He “argues that the typical ‘literary masterpiece’ of today is usually in fact a mediocre work dolled up with trendy writerly gimmicks designed to lend an impression of artsy profundity and to obscure the author’s lack of talent. Myers’s goal, he explains, is to convey to fellow readers that they shouldn’t feel cowed into reading (and pretending to be engaged by) the latest dull and pretentious book just because the literary establishment has pronounced it ‘evocative’ and ‘compelling.’Rather, Myers emphasizes, readers should trust their own instincts, and decide for themselves what books speak to them in meaningful ways.” The Atlantic 10/02

WHERE THE SNOBBERY IS: Maurice Sendak’s illustrations are unmistakable, and his drawings for such children’s classics as Where the Wild Things Are made him a legend to generations of young readers. But like so many popular artists before and after him, Sendak has some trouble being taken as a serious artist. “Snobbery is the biggest obstacle to him being recognized as a fine artist,” says Nichols Clark, director of the new Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. “And it’s not just Sendak. There are many illustrators who are far better artists than those who consider themselves fine artists.” The Christian Science Monitor 10/04/02

Thursday October 3

A NOT-TOO-POETIC DUST-UP: A firestorm has erupted in New Jersey over a poem written by the state’s poet laureate shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Governor Jim McGreevey has called for the resignation of Imamu Amiri Baraka from the laureate post after hearing the poem, which includes the line “Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the twin towers / To stay at home that day / Why did Sharon stay away?” (For the record, there weren’t 4,000 Israelis employed at the World Trade Centers.) The 67-year-old Baraka, who was inducted last year into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, calls his critics “right-wing zealots,” but has yet to directly answer the charges of anti-Semitism stemming from the poem. Washington Post 10/03/02

TEXAS VS. HISTORY: The Texas Board of Education is choosing new textbooks, and various groups are lobbying to modify what’s included in the history books. A group called the Texas Public Policy Foundation “wants texts modified to tell how African chieftains, not Europeans, captured slaves for sale in America. It wants to emphasize the role of white Europeans in ending slavery. It objects to portrayals of President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy as civil rights supporters, noting that the brothers refused to support the movement at crucial times. The group also wants texts to say that the Constitution protects an individual’s right to own guns and that the wealthy pay a disproportionate share of income taxes.” The New York Times 10/02/02

  • Previously: CLEANING UP DODGE: A Republican party “Leadership Council” in Texas is on a cultural crusade. So far it has succeeded in getting a plaster fig leaf added to a replica of a statue of David, remove some art from an Italian restaurant, “persuaded commissioners to use an Internet filter to screen computers at the library for pornography and to put plaques reading ‘In God We Trust’ in county libraries.” Houston Chronicle 09/24/02

WAITING FOR GILLER: This morning, the shortlist for the Giller Prize, Canada’s answer to the Booker, will be announced at a Toronto hotel. (The shortlist had not been released as of ArtsJournal‘s morning deadline.) “Often thought of as a lifetime achievement award, it does not go to a writer who has published some clever first novel with a small literary press in Saskatchewan, or some avant-garde novelist who is being enthusiastically championed by a professor of literature at Dalhousie… The winning novel is always a more-or-less conventional narrative, suitable for book clubs, and frequently a historical novel.” Toronto Star 10/03/02

GETTING ON THE GRID: The Library of Congress, the world’s largest library, is considering a new way to store its digital collection, which currently contains 7.5 million records. “When you’re (preserving) millions of digital entities you have to use automated processing.” Instead of keeping the data all in one computer system, the library may try grid storage. “All the digital data do not need to reside in the same physical location to be accessible and manageable by an institution charged with the mission of preserving and managing access to that digital data.” Wired 10/02/02

BARENBOIM THE PEACEMAKER: Israeli conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim, who has made waves in the Middle East twice in recent months, has co-authored a new book with Palestinian intellectual Edward Said calling for peace in the region. “The book, titled Parallels and Paradoxes, grew out of conversations between the two friends, both prominent cultural figures who first met a decade ago by chance at a London hotel… Last month, [Barenboim] and Said were named the winners of Spain’s Prince of Asturias Concord Prize for their efforts toward bringing peace to the Middle East.” Andante (AP) 10/03/02

Wednesday October 2

POETIC STANDOFF: The governor of New Jersey and the state’s poet laureate are at an impasse. The governor is angry about a poem that poet laureate Amiri Baraka wrote and read that wonders about an assertion that Jews were told in advance about the attack of the World Trade Center. The governor wants to remove Baraka because of the poem, but the poet says he’s entitled to write whatever he wants. “Under the legal technicalities of the appointment, neither [governor] McGreevey nor the five-member committee of poets who appointed him to the two-year post can remove Baraka.” Philadelphia Inquirer 10/02/02

REDISCOVERING BUDDHISM: Researchers are studying what may turn out to be some of the most important Buddhist documents ever found. “The manuscripts dated from the first century AD, and that made them the oldest known Buddhist manuscripts anywhere, and the oldest Indic manuscripts known to have survived.” The new discoveries reveal “a missing link between the birth of Buddhism in India and its later forms in China and elsewhere in Asia. Oral transmission had been the preferred or normal way – memorization, recitation, and so forth. What we’re now finding out is that, in the first and second century AD, the notion of writing things down took off in a big way.” Chronicle of Higher Education 10/04/02

MEDICAL WRITES: New York’s Bellevue Hospital publishes a literary journal and holds writing classes. “Publication of The Bellevue Review is part of a national trend in medical education for schools to use literature to teach doctors how to write better and clearer case histories and to empathize more with patients. Reading and writing literature helps doctors think more subtly, pay attention to the finer details, read between the lines, look for deeper meaning.” The New York Times 10/02/02

Tuesday October 1

WHEN A PUBLISHER FAILS: Sarah Dearing’s new book was published to glowing reviews in April. Unfortunately, it’s been almost impossible to get ahold of copies after her publisher Stoddart Publishing declared bankruptcy. So in the week that she just won the Toronto Book Award, she traveled to the Stoddart warehouse to buy some copies of her book that were being liquidated. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/01/02

LACK OF IMPORTANCE: Does the Booker choose only “safe” books? Writer Will Self says “there were very few Booker winners from the last 25 years that have ‘in any way rocked society’. Authors like Martin Amis and JG Ballard had only been nominated once while winners were not chosen if they were challenging.” BBC 10/01/02

Visual: October 2002

Thursday October 31

ON THE WHOLE, I PREFER HENRY MOORE, WOT? British culture minister Kim Howells took a walk through an exhibition of artwork by those chosen as Turner Prize finalists, and didn’t hold back on his reaction to it. On a message board in the gallery at the Tate, he wrote: “It’s cold, mechanical conceptual bullshit … The attempts at contextualisation are particularly pathetic but symptomatic of a lack of conviction.” The Independent (UK) 10/31/02

A NERVOUS ART MARKET: Whenever the economy goes down, the number of artworks up for auction goes up. “While the monetary total is not unusually high, the sheer number of works for sale this fall has increased. Some is being sold by people in financial distress, but many other sellers think this is the moment to cash in. The question is whether collectors will have the appetite, never mind the means, to buy.” The New York Times 10/31/02

PLAYING KEEP-AWAY WITH RAPHAEL: “An appeal to raise £30m to save a Raphael masterpiece for the [UK] has been launched by London’s National Gallery. The current owner of Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks, the Duke of Northumberland, has agreed to sell the painting to a US gallery to prop up his estate’s ailing finances. But he is giving the National Gallery – where the painting has been on loan for the last decade – one last chance to keep it.” BBC 10/31/02

ART OF NEWS: The Newseum unveils plans for a $400 million new home located on a prominent corner of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. It’s a museum dedicated to the art of news and newsgathering… Washington Post 10/29/02

Wednesday October 30

SOTHEBY’S DRAWS BIG FINE: Sotheby’s is fined more than 20 million Euros by the European Union for “operating a price-fixing cartel during the 1990s.” Fellow partner-in-crime Christie’s escaped punishment because the company came forward to provide evidence of price fixing. “The pair handle 90% of the auction market and have been under investigation by the commission for breaking fair trade rules. They were accused of inflating commission fees and defrauding art sellers out of £290 million.” BBC 10/30/02

ANOTHER TURNER CONTROVERSY: This year’s Turner Prize shortlist follows a tradition of nominating controversial art. It includes a work that is a graphic description of a pornographic movie. “The four shortlisted artists – Fiona Banner, Liam Gillick, Keith Tyson and Catherine Yass – will learn who has won the coveted prize, and with it a £20,000 cheque, in December.” BBC 10/30/02

  • THROWING UP FOR ART: With Stuckists protesting outside at the absence of traditional painters on the Turner shortlist, inside art glitterati were upchucking after watching a movie by one of the finalists (and it wasn’t the porn project). The Guardian (UK) 10/30/02
  • HANDICAPPING THE TURNER: The controversy, the noise, the predictable hype… the Turner is getting a bit boring. “It is all very undignified and divisive. The art itself gets kicked around like a football, in a game in which no one knows the rules. But it doesn’t matter – the game’s the thing!” Here come this year’s entries. The Guardian (UK) 10/30/02
  • WHERE’S THE BUZZ? “Truthfully, as balanced and fair and good as the 2002 list is, it is also a tiny bit dull. So that’s another thing then: when it comes to the Turner Prize, the Tate can never win.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/30/02
  • DON’T CARE? This year “mention of the Turner seems to have stirred intense apathy. The Britpack caught the imagination. But once they had clicked into cultural place as neatly as the mechanisms of a semi-automatic taking dead aim at the lowest common denominator, they were commonly announced to be ‘over’. And then no one seemed much to care what was upcoming for the Turner.” The Times (UK) 10/30/02

BATTLE FOR THE BARNES: Lincoln University is a small black college with control of an art collectionworth billions of dollars. But the Barnes Collection, claiming poverty and an unworkable relationship with Lincoln has filed a petition for divorce and announced its intention to move to Philadelphia. The plan is a blow to the tiny college, and court battles over the Barnes’ right to self determination figure to drag out a long time. The New York Times 10/30/02

ART ONLINE: Many museums have resisted putting images of their artworks online for fear that they would lose control of the images. A project in California seeks to put museum collections across the state online. “Users can search 150,000 images of artifacts, paintings, manuscripts, photographs and architectural blueprints from 11 public and private museums. But with more than 2,000 museums in the state, that’s just scratching the surface. ‘Our goal is to get every museum, library and archive in California to have their collections digitized and online’.” Wired 10/30/02

SHOOT ME: An art exhibition in Soho is drawing criticism for its violent theme, particularly after the DC-area sniper attacks. “Shoot Me, by the multimedia artist Miyoung Song, features a basement shooting gallery that enables visitors to take potshots with a BB gun at random women, children and porn stars in the throes of sex as they flash by on a video screen equipped with a paper bull’s eye.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/30/02

ART IN KIDDIELAND: “Parents may not be sure about dragging children along to see Art with a capital ‘A’, but the galleries are in no doubt at all. These days, public art galleries and museums have more kids’ courses and activity weeks, more hands-on, child-friendly, interactive workshops, more family trails, more learning centres than … well, Picassos and Matisses. It has got to the point that, for an art-loving adult, no visit to a gallery is free from the vague dread that an entire primary school class may be seated in front of your favourite painting, or gangs of adolescents ostentatiously tittering at the nudes on display.” The Guardian (UK) 10/30/02

Tuesday October 29

PARIS MUSEUMS PREPARE FOR SUPERFLOOD: Paris’ leading museums, including the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay are removing thousands of precious artworks from their basement storage because of fears about a hundred-year super-flood that could happen this winter. “We’re not saying the great centennial flood is coming this winter, we’re just saying we know it will come some time soon and the signs are not encouraging. We have to make sure we can deal with it when it happens.” The Guardian (UK) 10/26/02

SCULPTOR REGRETS REMOVING CONTROVERSIAL ART: Last month sculptor Eric Fischl’s bronze sculpture of a falling body commemorating 9/11 was removed from Rockefeller Center after a few people complained. Now Fischl regrets that he allowed the piece to be taken away so quickly. “I even regret caving in to Rockefeller Center so fast and saying: ‘Yeah, take it away. I don’t want to hurt anybody.’ I’m sorry I didn’t raise a stink over it. I hate this idea that there are some people who have a right to express their suffering and others who don’t, that there are those in this hierarchy of pain who own it more than you do.” New York Times Magazine 10/27/02

MILLION £ SOUP: Andy Warhol’s screenprint of Marilyn Munroe sold for more than $17 million. But the artist’s family is selling Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s soup can for only £1 million. The Guardian (UK) 10/29/02

BRITAIN’S WOEFUL PUBLIC BUILDING RECORD: Why are public building projects in Britain so woefully carried out? “In Britain we have become so used to the idea that any major public building project will be delivered several years late and costing some multiple of the figure originally predicted that initial projections are treated rather like the boasts of an imaginative angler.” The UK has failed to invest in its educational infrastructure. What’s needed is a massive education plan for engineers and architects… The Guardian (UK) 10/29/02

Monday October 28

A RECORD WEEK: “Sixteen auction records were broken in just over two hours at the 20th-century Italian art sales in London last week. But, bullish as this sounds, the reality was more sober…” The Telegraph (UK) 10/28/02

LOOKING FOR A DIGITAL HOME: Seeing how there are museums for just about anything, is there a possibility of a museum devoted to digital art? “Efforts to establish a one-stop shop for the digital arts — a Linkin’ Center, if you will — have been, at best, modestly successful. Donors are tight fisted, especially when there are no tangible objects that they can call their own. As a result, while there are small high-tech art centers scattered around the country and virtual museums sprinkled across the Web, none fulfill the museum functions of organizing, commissioning, exhibiting, collecting, preserving art works and education. But two organizations are moving in the right direction.” The New York Times 10/28/02

INVESTING IN SCOTTISH ART: The Scottish government has come up with a plan to help museums across the country buy contemporary art. Ten musems will share £350,000 to spend on new work. The government “believes the scheme will revolutionise local museums, and also provide an opportunity for award-winning artists such as Douglas Gordon, Calum Colvin, Callum Innes and Roderick Buchanan to be represented in Scottish collections.” Glasgow Herald 10/26/02

MASS APPEAL: Over the next few years some 3.8 million new houses will be built in the UK. So “what might they look like, and what might they be like to live in? After a long sabbatical from the design of mass housing, British architects are making their way back. They are not finding it particularly easy.” The Guardian (UK) 10/28/02

YE OLDE OBELISK TRANSPORT COMPANY: In ancient times hundreds of obelisks lined the Nile. But beginning in Roman times, foreign countries made sport of taking souvenirs, and it became fashionable to remove the giant stone obelisks and bring them back for placement in leading cities. One of the last taken was transported to New York in 1881 to Central Park, where thousands of New Yorkers waited… Archaelogy 11/02

THE MAN BEHIND REM, DANIEL, ANISH… Modern architects like Rem Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskind like to dazzle with theatrical structures. But Cecil Balmond is the engineer behind them who helps make the ideas possible. “Balmond’s structures tend to look as if they have no business standing up. Instead of depending on massive walls and simple symmetry for their strength, they rely on what he presents as being a deeper understanding of nature. In his softly-spoken but determined way, Balmond is trying to shift the way that we see engineers, as well as engineering.” The Observer (UK) 10/27/02

Sunday October 27

JESUS IN ONTARIO: “A 2,000-year-old limestone box that some believe provides the first archeological evidence of the existence of Jesus will have its international public premiere next month in Canada… The rectangular ossuary, which dates from about 63 AD, was excavated by an Arab villager about 15 years ago in a cave near Jerusalem, then sold to an antiquities dealer. He in turn sold it to an Israeli collector, who, in March of this year, brought it to the attention of Sorbonne scholar André Lemaire, one of the two experts who vouched for its great age.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 10/26/02

THE GREATEST ARTS PATRONS OF ALL TIME: It seems safe to say that the world will never again see a family like the Medicis, who held up the financial end of artistic achievement in Europe for more than 500 years. Without the Medici family, there would have been no Michelangelo, very little of Galileo, and the Rennaissance might have been little more than an average movement in the history of art. A new exhibit in Chicago focuses on the last glory days of the Medici, with more than 200 works on display. Chicago Tribune 10/27/02

EVERYTHING (EUROPEAN) MUST GO: As part of its new mission of focusing its collection on American art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is auctioning off 34 works by Europeans artists next week, with the proceeds to be used to beef up the academy’s American collection. “The consigned works… are with several exceptions by relatively obscure and unfashionable artists, and only a few carry estimates of more than $100,000.” Philadelphia Inquirer 10/23/02

HOW MUCH IS THAT AMERICAN NEA BUDGET, AGAIN? In Austria, a country with nowhere near the wealth and resources of the U.S., governmental investment in ‘quality of life’ is a societal mainstay. From subways to buildings to the Vienna Philharmonic, public money is the key component of success. In particular, the city’s architecture, supported by government funding, is stunning, especially given how little of Vienna was left after World War II. Boston Globe 10/27/02

Friday October 25

DEFENDING THE COLLECTOR: “A group of American collectors has formed a new organisation to defend the interests of private and public collecting. They see threats to collecting coming from foreign countries, over-zealous law enforcement and a public debate, which, according to them, has been driven by the ‘retentionist’ bias of many archaeologists.” The Art Newspaper 10/25/02

ART AS GLOBAL IMPULSE: Vicente Todoli takes over this month as the Tate Modern’s new director. He observes that internationalism is an important artistic impulse. “Art has always been moved by individuals. Before businessmen, artists were the precursors in breaking down frontiers. Globalisation is the essential spirit of art. The world is wider today and art has always had an openness of viewpoints because that is its nature. The only problem today is tremendous commercialisation which is killing much creativity and controls the mind of some artists who take decisions dictated by it.” The Art Newspaper 10/25/02

BIG NEW ART PRIZE: Wales has launched the world’s most lucrative prize for visual artists. The £40,000 Artes Mundi biennial competition “will be open to artists from across the globe whose entries will in turn be shown in Cardiff at the National Museum and Gallery. The organisers are hoping the prize will give to the arts the same kind of stature that the hugely-popular Cardiff Singer of the World has given music.” BBC 10/25/02

THE GREAT COVERUP: Two sculptures that Renaissance artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini made for a church almost 350 years ago, have finally been unveiled. “The two sculptures, which represent the virtues of Truth and Charity, were designed by Bernini in the 17th Century for the chapel of a Portuguese aristocrat, Roderigo de Sylva. They have been located in the chapel since they were completed in 1663, but were deemed offensive by religious leaders two centuries later, and covered up.” BBC 10/25/02

THE PAINTING PACHYDERMS: Zookeepers have long observed that elephants like to pick up sticks and doodle in the sand. “Elephants are highly intelligent animals who don’t particularly like to stand around all day.” Now a group of Balinese elephants are painting and earning a following (and cash). “Their work has been exhibited at several museums worldwide. And recently, the handlers of a dozen or so painting pachyderms in Asia formed a website. Within two months, sales broke $100,000. Half of the profits go to elephant-rescue sanctuaries in Southeast Asia.” Christian Science Monitor 10/25/02

Thursday October 24

REVOKING FREE ADMISSION? London’s Natural History Museum saw a 70 percent increase in attendance last year after it dropped entry fees. In return for free admission, the British government promised museums more money. But “museum bosses have told MPs the extra volume of visitors is costing them £500,000 ($773,000) a year more than they receive in return for giving up charging.” So the museum is thinking about reinstating the entry fees… More museums may follow, given the government’s disappointing funding promises earlier this week. BBC 10/24/02

DEALING WITH THE BRITISH MUSEUM: The British Museum is getting a raw deal in the government’s new funding plan, writes former Culture Secretary Chris Smith. But the museum’s present predicament is not entirely a funding issue. “The museum has to put its own house in order too, and run itself more efficiently.” The Guardian (UK) 10/24/02

LOOTING THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION: “Since Iraq’s defeat in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, thieves have been stealing anything they can Because Iraq’s antiquities bureaucracy collapsed after the war and even today only is a fraction of what it once was, the country’s 10,000 known ancient sites – plus many more yet to be documented – have been easy targets for the last decade. The frenzy of looting has panicked experts on ancient Mesopotamia, long seen by scholars as the cradle of the first civilizations.” Detroit News 10/23/02

STATUES DAMAGED BY CLEANERS: Four busts of Great Britons Isaac Newton, William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, and John Hunter have stood watch over London’s Leicester Square in central London for almost 130 years. They have survived war, pollution and the elements. But not, apparently, a restoration cleaning in the early 1990s. “It appears the cleaners used a highly corrosive, concentrated solution of hydroflouric acid. If the busts are left outside, they will continue to deteriorate. Within two decades they could be just meaningless lumps of rock.” The Guardian (UK) 10/24/02

  • STATUES IN JEOPARDY: Oslo’s famous Vigeland bronze statues are being destroyed by moisture. “At the same time, the original works are covered with a layer of dirt that cannot be removed without destroying the statues.” Aftenpost (Norway)10/16/02

Wednesday October 23

MUSEUMS ATTACK LOW FUNDING PROMISE: UK museum directors fretted yesterday after a government announcement that £70 million in funding would be allocated to the country’s museums. “A government-sponsored report found that, unless £167 million was found, many institutions with world-class exhibits would be pushed into irreversible decline. The response from museums was angry and swift.” The Guardian (UK)10/23/02

  • Previously: BRITISH MUSEUM GETS CASH: The British government announces a £70 million funding package for the British Museum and regional museums. The BM’s financial crisis has been so bad it has had to close galleries and reduce hours as it deals with a large deficit. “The BM will receive £36.8m, with an extra £400,000 in 2003 to re-open the Korean Galleries and others currently closed.” BBC 10/22/02

GETTY CAN EXPAND VILLA: After the Getty Museum moved into its new home in 1997, the museum announced plans to add an outdoor theatre to the Getty’s former headquarters in its Malibu villa. Neighbors sued to block the plan. Now a judge has ruled in the Getty’s favor. In addition to the theatre, “the villa complex would grow to 210,000 square feet, including a new restaurant to replace the site’s old tea room, expansion of the bookstore and renovation of museum galleries for display of the Getty antiquities collection.” Los Angeles Times 10/23/02

MEMORIES OF EMPIRE: The British Empire is today referred to but seldom examined very closely. “Is it shame, guilt, post-colonial exhaustion or plain ignorance that has obliterated the memory of an empire that lasted 500 years and changed the face of the world? Probably all of these. But no one in Britain today can understand what has shaped our multiracial society, what links this country to the Commonwealth and what has made English the tongue of more nations than any other unless they understand the Empire.” The Times (UK) 10/23/02

Tuesday October 22

BRITISH MUSEUM GETS CASH: The British government announces a £70 million funding package for the British Museum and regional museums. The BM’s financial crisis has been so bad it has had to close galleries and reduce hours as it deals with a large deficit. “The BM will receive £36.8m, with an extra £400,000 in 2003 to re-open the Korean Galleries and others currently closed.” BBC 10/22/02

AUSSIE ARTS COUNCIL EXPLORES ARTIST TRUST ACCOUNTS: The Australian Arts Council is investigating the idea of setting up trust accounts for artists. Gallery sales would be deposited into the accounts directly for the artists. “There are a whole range of other businesses and services that require that the intermediary – the real estate agent, the travel agent, the lawyer – holds funds in a trust account. The point is, if a work has been sold then the value of that work, less the agent’s fee, is the artist’s money.” Sydney Morning Herald 10/22/02

THE GREAT PAINTING CONTEST: In the 16th Century on of the most extraordinary public art collaborations ever, teamed Michelangelo and Leonardo to paint side by side paintings in the Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Art historians call the project “the turning point of the Renaissance.” But Giorgio Vasari, the famous chronicler of Renaissance painters’ lives, had the wall painted over, obliterating the art… The Guardian (UK) 10/22/02

THE VIETNAM WAR IN ART: “Vietnam had no great tradition of visual art before the 20th century, with even its sacred buildings austere compared to those of neighboring China. By the time the Vietnam War erupted, however, local artists had been shaped by two quite different imported traditions: what was known as poetic realism, introduced by French colonial teachers, and Socialist Realism, borrowed from the Communist regimes in Moscow and Beijing.” The New York Times 10/22/02

Monday October 21

WHERE’S THE QUALITY WORK? The number of art and antiques fairs has zoomed in the past decade. But some of the fairs are starting to struggle. There are “too many events and not enough dealers offering the kind of quality material demanded by collectors in the market’s present selective mood.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/21/02

THE PRADO’S INVISIBLE RENOVATIONS: Madrid’s Prado Museum is in the middle of a $45 million renovation. “The Prado will belatedly join a host of other museums, from the Louvre in Paris to the National Gallery in Washington, that have built annexes for art and assorted services. But the Prado is different: it wants its $45 million extension to go largely unnoticed.” The New York Times 10/21/02

IN PRAISE OF THE BILBAO EFFECT – FIVE YEARS ON: Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim Museum is five years old. “The Bilbao effect is viewed by many as a triumph of style over substance, a type of global branding that used to be confined to items such as fashionable shoes and whatnot. And the style itself – especially the ‘signature’ buildings whose complex, odd-looking forms could never have been designed and built without the aid of advanced computer technology – is considered highly suspect.” Washington Post 10/20/02

REMEMBERING LEWIS AND CLARK: Artist Maya Lin is designing a project to mark the voyage of Lewis and Clark across the American West. “Known as the Confluence Project, the $15 million effort scheduled to open in 2005 marks the last stops on Lewis and Clark’s epic, cross-country journey that began on the Missouri River and ended up here, along the Columbia River. There could be as many as eight sites total.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10/18/02

BEIJING’S NEW KOOLHAAS: Architect Rem Koolhaas has “just won the international competition to design the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing. The project, costed at about €600m ($585m/£377m), will be the most prestigious the capital has seen for decades. It will be [Koolhaas’s] greatest challenge to date: CCTV, the world’s biggest television network, reaches nearly 300m households, or more than 1bn people, and runs 12 channels of programmes.” Financial Times 10/21/02

Sunday October 10

IS MEXICO THE NEW CUBA? Mexico seems to be the hot place for art these days. At least that’s what it seems like as planeloads of international curators descend. They’re there, they say “because these artists have shown such wit, energy and international perspective – the sort of sophistication that the conventionally wise expect from art capitals like New York and Berlin. But these are artists schooled in skepticism, and some can’t help but wonder: What if it’s really just Mexico City’s turn to be the art world’s flavor of the month? Or worse, what if all this attention isn’t really about art at all?” Los Angeles Times 10/20/02

COWTOWN TAKES THE STAGE: The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and its new 53,000 square-foot building will be the second largest museum devoted to art after World War II in the United States. What does it mean “when a place known as Cowtown suddenly takes the stage? After all, contemporary art is supposed to be a big-city sport, and Fort Worth is asking the world to rethink that concept.” Dallas Morning News 10/20/02

ODDS AND ENDS: Is Matthew Barney “the most important artist of his generation? His art can feel like a bizarre conglomeration of everything that has come before, from Celtic myths to the Baroque and on to the most recent movies, novels, conceptual art and sculpture. Barney stuffs it all in, and leaves your head spinning.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/19/02

A NEW LOOK FOR NY BUILDINGS: A big new hotel in Times Square has people thinking ugly. But perhaps it’s just a change of aesthetic coming to a city that has rarely been touted for good-looking architecture. “The city’s shifting demographic is one reason our architecture seems destined to become increasingly Latinized in the years ahead. A more important reason stems from the exhaustion of the northern European version of the Western tradition. That linear, 19th-century view of history has fallen apart as a measure of urban architecture. Post-modernism, a movement that tried to extend that line beyond its natural span, had the opposite effect of running it into the ground.” The New York Times 10/20/02

Friday October 18

POLICE RAID ART: Police in Toronto raid a gallery to investigate photographs by AA Bronson, one of Canada’s outstanding artists. “I asked to talk to an officer and he told me a concerned parent from the neighbourhood voiced a complaint and they had to bring in the sex crimes unit to take pictures of the window to determine whether it was obscene.” Toronto Star 10/18/02

NEW HISTORY MUSEUM CHIEF: Brent D. Glass, head of the Pennsylvania Historical Commission, has been named director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The museum is “home to the original Star-Spangled Banner, Archie Bunker’s chair, Duke Ellington’s music collections and the wooden lap desk on which Thomas Jefferson composed the Declaration of Independence. Opened in 1964, the museum is now the third most visited in the world.” Washington Post 10/18/02

JAPANESE SELL OFF ART: In the 1980s Japanese art collectors bought some of the world’s most expensive and high profile art. When the country’s economy tanked in the 90s, much of the high-priced art was quietly sold. “Now the Japanese recession is digging so deep that individuals and even respected museums are being forced to sell pieces acquired well before the Bubble period, including pieces officially listed as Important Art Objects.” The Art Newspaper 10/15/02

TRACKING DOWN THE QUEEN’S WHISTLERS: By the time she died, Queen Victoria owned 157 Whistler prints – more than any British museum. Then they were sold off, and some experts believe that many of the etchings ended up in American collections. So what provoked the sell-off? The Art Newspaper 10/15/02

Thursday October 17

COMMUNAL BUY: There’s a long tradition of museums sharing exhibitions and artwork for exhibitions. Now some are also sharing ownership of artwork. “Aside from economic considerations that lead museums to collaborate, the kind of art being produced today lends itself more readily to group ownership.” The New York Times 10/17/02

MAFIA TURNS TO ARCHAEOLOGY: “Mafia groups in the Ukraine are pursuing a lucrative sideline in archaeology, looting valuable artefacts to be sold on the black market, in addition to their traditional criminal enterprises such as selling drugs, prostitution and protection rackets. Their latest target is Crimea, in the southern Ukraine, which is host to vast quantities of buried treasures from Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Bronze Age settlements.” Scotland on Sunday 10/14/02

Wednesday October 16

POLL SAYS BRITS FAVOR RETURNING MARBLES: Forty per cent British respondants in a poll say that they thought Britain ought to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece. Only 16 percent said they should stay in the British Museum. “The figures are almost identical to a similar poll conducted in 1988.” BBC 10/16/02

NAZI LOOT ONLINE: How to track down artwork stolen by Nazis in World War II? “American museums now think that the Web can help in their attempt to uncover the Nazi loot that may still be hanging on their walls. In September 2002, the American Association of Museums received a $240,000 grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Sciences for the creation of a Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal: a registry of objects in American museums of questionable ownership.” Salon 10/16/02

BLAME IT ON THE COMPUTERS? “The buildings of the public realm in corporate New Britain are the stuff of dreary private finance initiatives, concerned with delivering numerical targets rather than creating beautiful spaces and buildings. When you look back to a time when architects, sculptors and writers got together to mull over the direction and design of new buildings, to challenge architectural orthodoxies and plan ideal solutions for public projects, it all seems so long ago, and so improbable, that it might as well be the stuff of fiction.” The Guardian (UK) 10/14/02

Tuesday October 15

BRITISH MUSEUM CONSIDERS SELLING A BUILDING: The British Museum has a £6 million deficit after a major expansion and a decline in expected income. So the museum is considering trying to sell off one of its Central London buildings. “The building, a former post office just a couple of hundred yards from the museum’s main site, is reportedly worth some £35 million. It has been derelict for some years.” BBC 10/15/02

BUT IS IT ARCHITECTURE? The unorthodox Gateshead Millennium bridge has won this year’s Stirling Prize for Architecture. Judges for the Royal Institute of British Architects’ annual prize said the “simple and incredibly elegant £22 million bridge was not only an innovative and bold engineering challenge, but also the one piece of architecture that would be remembered by people this year.” The Guardian (UK) 10/14/02

NASTY PICTURES: The Brooklyn Museum’s show of Victorian nudes “is yet another chapter in the so-called culture wars,” writes Roger Kimball. “Over the past decade or so, it has become increasingly clear that this war is a battle about everything the Victorians are famous for: the ‘cleanliness, hard work, strict self-discipline,’ etc., that one of the people responsible for this exhibition speaks of with such contempt. Do those values, those virtues, articulate noble human aspirations? Or are they merely the repressive blind for … well, you name it: narrowness, hypocrisy, the expression of a ‘white, patriarchal, capitalist, hegemonic,’ blah, blah, blah?” New Criterion 10/02

EXPANDING MASS MOCA: The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, (MASS MoCA), in North Adams, is expanding. The museum is renovating the complex at the former Sprague Electric Co. Within two years, they expect to add 45,000 square feet of commercial space at the site, and by 2008, 140,000 square feet of new galleries. Since it opened three years ago, Mass MoCA has spent $26 million of state money to open some 180,000 square feet of galleries and commercial space in a rehabilitated mill.” Boston Herald 10/15/02

FRIDA FETISH: Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is “currently the height of radical chic, and is likely to be even more in vogue when Julie Taymor’s movie Frida, starring Salma Hayek, opens next year. But it is hard not to feel that there is something distasteful and unhealthy about the way we like our artists – particularly if they are women – to suffer. Would there be half as much interest in Kahlo’s paintings if her life had been half as colourful and tragic?” The Guardian (UK) 10/14/02

Monday October 14

DEFINING MOMENT: Connecticut arts leaders were surprised when Kate Sellers resigned as director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art earlier this month in the middle of raising $120 million for an expansion. “Sellers’ walking away from what would have been a career-defining moment, at one of the most pivotal periods in the museum’s 160-year history, makes one wonder what was going on…” Hartford Courant 10/14/02

Sunday October 13

ATTACKING ART, LITERALLY: Cultural terrorism – the destruction of public art and artifacts in the name of political gain – has yet to reach American shores, but is a major concern around the world. “The shelling of the Bosnian National Library in Sarejevo in August 1992, by Serbian nationalists dug in the hills surrounding the city… and the fire it caused, destroyed thousands of priceless manuscripts and books, as well as gutting a historic and beautiful building.” And who could forget the Taliban’s destruction of the massive Bamyan Buddhas in Afghanistan as the world’s cultural leaders pleaded with them to stop? Such acts of wanton destruction are often minimized when placed alongside terrorist attacks on human life, but the cold reality is that the cultural death toll may be more permanent than the human one. Toronto Star 10/12/02

NEW TRENDS AT THE AUCTION BLOCK: The new auction season is officially on, and some interesting broadening of views on old schools of art seems to be occurring in London. A Sotheby’s auction of mainly modern masters this week “projected a new image of German Avant-garde trends in the first half of the 20th century by bringing out the continuity of mood from the Expressionism of 1908 to 1914 to the Abstractionism of the 1920s and 1930s. Most works shared an intensity in the color schemes, a thrust in the brush work, an energy bordering on fierceness and a sternness that was sometimes grim. Lighthearted subjects took on a gravitas at odds with their nature.” International Herald Tribune 10/12/02

WHO SAYS JOURNALISTS ARE NEGATIVE? “Something has clicked in the consciousness of New Yorkers. After lying down in the waters of sorrow, New Yorkers are standing up to speak about the florescence of an idea. Architecture matters. The gaping wound of Lower Manhattan could never be healed by the conventions of real-estate development, in which parcels of land are arranged like slabs of meat on a plate. They see this now with a sanguine clarity even while the grief for their hometown still lingers. What the post-Sept. 11 city needs more than ever is architecture by the world’s most intelligent creators — that is what New Yorkers have demanded and that is exactly what is about to be dished out.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 10/13/02

GEHRY’S BUSINESS SCHOOL: “Dedicated Wednesday, the $62 million [Frank Gehry-designed] Peter B. Lewis Building for the Weatherhead School of Management at [Cleveland’s] Case Western Reserve University is by no means a triumph like Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. But to measure every building by that epoch-defining structure is to set an almost impossibly high standard. Not every design can be a masterpiece. Some turn out to be steps along the journey rather than a final destination. This one certainly takes us on a trip. It marks a decisive break, at once flawed and fabulous, out of the typical B-School box.” Chicago Tribune 10/13/02

A JETTY REEMERGES: “The most famous work of American art that almost nobody has ever seen in the flesh is Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty’: 6,650 tons of black basalt and earth in the shape of a gigantic coil, 1,500 feet long, projecting into the remote shallows of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where the water is rose red from algae.” The visual effect is stunning, when the coil can be seen, but it has been years since the murky waters of the lake yielded up Smithson’s work to the eyes of visitors. But with drought sweeping the American West, the water level is lower than it has ever been, and the jetty has reappeared, at least for the time being. The New York Times Magazine 10/13/02

Friday October 11

ART SALES DOWN THIS YEAR: The Art Sales Index shows that the value of art sold in the past year declined 13-14 percent. “In the wake of 11 September, collapsing stock exchanges and high international tension, the art market has had a tough season, and while some stellar prices have been achieved, this has tended to obscure a very real weakness in the middle market.” The Art Newspaper 10/11/02

TURNER FAMILY MAY WANT PAINTINGS BACK: William Turner’s descendants are threatening to take back the painter’s work from London museums. “Relatives say the Tate and the National Gallery ignored the artist’s wishes that his collection, now worth an estimated £500million, should be kept in rooms specifically for his work. They are considering legal action to try to force the galleries to return the paintings.” London Evening Standard 10/10/02

TAKE ALL YOU WANT. WE’LL MAKE MORE: “Guests at the Lake Placid Lodge, a longtime wilderness camp turned year-round posh resort on the shore of Lake Placid facing Whiteface Mountain (and the singer Kate Smith’s former lakeside compound), don’t have to confine themselves to taking a towel as a souvenir of their stay. They can take the whole antlered room. It’s fine with the management. As long as they pay for it, of course. That’s because the Lake Placid Lodge — where the 34 rooms and cabins go for $350 to $950 a night with breakfast and afternoon tea — doubles as an art gallery and what the owners call the largest showplace of rustic art furniture in the country.” The New York Times 10/11/02

SCALING BACK IN L.A.: “The Children’s Museum of Los Angeles has put on hold plans to build its $60-million museum in Little Tokyo, one of two new proposed branches, because of the weak economy, the president of the museum’s board of trustees said Thursday… The decision to defer Art Park and focus the museum’s resources on Hansen Dam was made last week after months of debate by the museum’s board of governors.” Los Angeles Times 10/11/02

Thursday October 10

UK MUSEUMS LOOKING FOR PROMISED HELP: UK museums are hurting. A survey last summer uncovered “a litany closures, decaying buildings, collapsing morale and inadequate acquisition funds,” warning that “unless £167 million was found for museums outside London, the ‘brain drain’ from the provinces after years of underfunding would be hastened, driving many museums into irreversible decline.” The government promised help. But months later, that help is not assured, and some are beginning to wonder… The Guardian (UK) 10/10/02

MISSING MORE THAN A RIB: Experts at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art are assessing the damage to a 15th-century statue depicting Adam eating the forbidden fruit, after the statue tumbled off its pedestal and shattered this week. Despite extensive breakage, the museum believes that it has “a good chance of returning the statue to public view with no signs of destruction visible to the untrained eye.” BBC 10/10/02

ART STANDS IN FOR REALITY: Absent a decent picture for its cover a couple weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine hired an artist to transform a blurry photo into a clear portrait. “Times policy, like that of this paper and many others, forbids the manipulation of news photos… So the magazine had one of them turned into a more striking blurry painting, on the principle that fine art can rework reality any way it pleases, without answering to issues of journalistic ethics.” But, wonders art critic Blake Gopnik, does calling it art solve the ethical issues? Washington Post 10/06/02

Wednesday October 9

SCOTLAND BUYS BEUYS: The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has scored a coup. For £605,000 – “hardly enough to buy you the pickled hind quarters of a Damien Hirst” – the gallery has purchased a major collection of the work of Joseph Beuys. “The drawings, lithographs, photographs, books and sculptures amount to a third of the German artist’s multiples, editionalised versions of his works he produced to bring his art to the widest public.” The Guardian (UK) 10/09/02

AUSTRALIA FIRST: There seems to be consensus that this year’s Melbourne Art Fair was a success. Except if you were a European gallery. There was plenty of buying, but sales were mostly by Australian artists, not Europeans. Is it parochialism? “Usually, in Europe, if you like something, you go for it, especially if it’s affordable, because you trust your taste. And then you inquire about the artist. But here (potential buyers) need five people to tell them something is good. Here, collectors have, say, three artists. They know them forever and stick to them. It’s very narrow-minded.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/09/02

THERE ONCE WAS A PAINTING FROM GHENT… In 1934 a panel painted by van Eyck was stolen from in Ghent’s St Bavo Cathedral. In the decades since, the mystery of its disappearance deepened. Was it hidden elsewhere in the church? Was it sold to a collector? Was it destroyed? Last week a taxi driver claimed to have some answers… The Guardian (UK) 10/09/02

MET STATUE CRASHES TO FLOOR: Sunday night a 15th-century marble statue of Adam by the Venetian sculptor Tullio Lombardo at the Metropolitan Museum in New York fell off its pedestal and crashed to the floor. “The museum has now tentatively concluded that the 6-foot-3-inch statue fell to the ground when one side of the 4-inch-high base of its pedestal apparently buckled, tipping over both the pedestal and statue.” The New York Times 10/09/02

RETHINKING PICASSO: Was Picasso a “selfish, miserly old goat who destroyed the lives of those closest to him?” That’s certainly been the picture painted of him. But the artist’s grandson begs to differ. He’s “tired of half-baked theories that misunderstand Picasso’s life and work.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/09/02

Tuesday October 8

FUN…BUT CONFUSING? The Seoul Media Art Biennale is opening, and organizers hope they’ve learned some lessons from the last biennale, which didn’t draw large crowds. “But a general Korean audience, the target of the exhibition, may not be ready for the experimental pieces in the show. While many of the entries use fun, high-tech gadgets – DVD technology, video games, computer monitors and hard drives, digital photography, multiple television screens – and are visually entertaining, many invoke confusion, possibly distancing art further from the general public.” Korea Herald 10/08/02

BIG DEAL: The Tate Modern is unveiling a giant sculpture created by Anish Kapoor for the museum. “The work, which measures almost 150m in length and is 10 storeys high, spans the entire entrance of the art gallery. ‘It’s a big thing because it needs to be a big thing. One hopes that it’s a deep thing’.” BBC 10/08/02

LONG ROAD AHEAD FOR THE BARNES: The Barnes Collection outside Philadelphia is trying to move inside Philadelphia. Though the Barnes has lined up plenty of support from civic leaders, funders and foundations, and though many in Philadelphia are anxious to get the Barnes to come to town, Albert Barnes’ will must be challenged in court. “This is not something that will be decided in the court of public opinion. This is going to be up to the courts, and it could be a very long process.” Washington Post 10/08/02

Monday October 7

ALTERED STATES: Just before the Royal Academy’s new show Galleries opened last month, a work by the artist collective Inventory, an “anti-imperialist tirade, sprayed directly onto the RA’s walls”, was sprayed over to cover up its anti-American references. Wasthe RA being tactful in removing “rude” material, or were the artists being censored? The Art Newspaper 10/04/02

THWARTING KHAN: The Aga Khan has been trying to buy property on the Thames in London to build a museum for his art collection – the largest collection of Islamic art in the English-speaking world. But the National Health Service wants the land (owned by King’s College) so the hospital next door can expand. Though the Aga Khan offers more than twice the money for the property, the sale is likely to be made to the Health Service, prompting some to worry that the Aga Khan might take his collection out of England. The Observer 10/06/02

ANCIENT ASTRONOMERS: Three years ago looters in Germany, “equipped with a metal detector and basic household tools…stumbled upon one of the greatest archaeological finds of this century.” It’s a disc 30 centimeters in diameter weighing approximately 2 kilograms, and thought to be around 3,600 years old. “The disc shows that northern Europeans, probably Celts, made a science of astronomy at roughly the same time as the Stonehenge astronomical cult site was built in Britain.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10/04/02

Sunday October 6

THE DRAMATIC GESTURE: Of the seven finalists for this year’s Stirling Prize for architecture, the oddsmaker’s favorite isn’t a building, but a dramatic bridge. “The Gateshead Millennium Bridge makes a great photograph, an elegant structure that perfectly marries engineering and architecture, it represents the epitome of design for the High-Tech generation.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/05/02

ART AS A CONCEPT (FIRST): For 30 years Ronald Feldman’s New York gallery has served up art that wasn’t exactly the obvious sell. “Remaining on the edge for Mr. Feldman has meant staging ambitious installations and group exhibitions that could never recoup their costs. ‘I didn’t start with a concept or a business plan — I just did it. The real challenge was to see art in your time and become an advocate for it’.” The New York Times 10/06/02

Friday October 4

TURIN FIRE WASN’T ARSON: In 1997, fire destroyed the newly-restored Chapel of the Holy Shroud. An investigation has finally conculded the fire wasn’t arson. “Twelve cathedral custodians have been accused of sounding the alarm too late. Contractors undertaking restoration in the chapel stand accused of failing to switch the electricity off at the mains, a terrible oversight which is believed to have caused the fire. Experts say the fire was started by an electrical arc flash which set fire to the restorers’ wooden scaffolding crowding the baroque chapel.” The Art Newspaper 10/04/02

SCULPTURE TO THE FORE: At Washington’s National Gallery, the sculture collection has always taken a back seat to the museum’s impressive displays of painting, possibly because of the physical and aesthetic difficulties of exhibiting large quantities of sculpture. But a suite of new galleries at the National has been carefully designed to showcase 800 three-dimensional works, and Roberta Smith, for one, is impressed. The New York Times 10/04/02

DEEP THINKING AT STANFORD: “After many nervous hours of careful maneuvering onto a pedestal Monday, The Thinker, one of the world’s most recognizable sculptures, was home again at Stanford University’s Cantor arts center after a three-year journey overseas. The contours of its freshly waxed bronze gleamed, heralding a confluence of events this week to honor not only the works of its famous creator, Auguste Rodin, but also the posthumous publication of a catalog of Rodin’s work by one of his greatest advocates, Stanford art Professor Albert Elsen.” San Jose Mercury News 10/01/02

Wednesday October 2

CUTS PLANNED FOR THE GUGGENHEIM: The Guggenheim is facing a budget crisis, even after laying off staff and closing its Soho branch last year. Now the museum is planning further staff cuts and reducing its exhibition hours in New York. “Asked to confirm reports that the museum’s operating budget was cut to $25.9 million in 2002 from $49 million in 2001,” museum officials acknowledged big cuts but were “not comfortable discussing exact numbers.” There are also rumors the Guggenheim’s Las Vegas museum might close in 2003. New York Sun 10/01/02

ITALY RETURNING PIECE OF THE PARTHENON: Italy plans to return a piece of the marble frieze from the Parthenon that it has held since the 1700s. “The fragment, held at a museum in Sicily, consists of a goddess’s foot and part of her tunic and once formed part of the frieze on the east side of the Parthenon.” Italy’s president calls the move a “gesture of friendship.” The Times (UK) 10/01/02

BRITISH MUSEUM SAYS CLAIM IS “COMPELLING”: The British Museum says there is “compelling evidence” that four Old Master drawings it owns were looted by the Nazis. The museum’s trustees described the claim as ‘detailed and compelling’. The artworks – thought to be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds – are said to have been stolen between 1935 and 1945 from a collection owned by Dr Arthur Feldmann, of Brno, in the Czech Republic.” BBC 10/02/02

WRITING’S ON THE WALL: In Milwaukee, Coca Cola is sponsoring an art contest in which winners designs are painted onto walls. But city officials aren’t happy. Some believe that the art might encourage graffiti artists. “Some businesses may welcome a winning picture as a mural on a wall, but [one official] says the presence of graffiti-style art only inspires others to express themselves on other walls without permission.” The Star-Tribune (Minneapolis) 10/01/02

AN AMERICANA (LAWSUIT) STORY: The Saturday Evening Post is suing a Connecticut museum to get back a painting by John Falter that was once used on the cover of the publication. The museum “got the painting as a gift in 1977 from Kenneth Stuart. The lawsuit claims that Stuart, the Post’s art director from 1942 to 1963, took the Falter piece without permission and didn’t legally own the work when he donated it. Stuart died in 1993.” Hartford Courant 10/02/02

Tuesday October 1

LOOKING FOR ART THAT MATTERS: Jed Perl wonders about a cure for the malaise that has long dogged the artworld. “Although gallerygoers are stirred by contemporary art and museumgoers are having extraordinary experiences, there is a widespread belief that nothing really adds up, either for the artists or for the audiences. No matter how eye-filling the experiences that people are having, those experiences can end up feeling disconnected, isolated, stripped of context and implication. The art may not disappoint, but there is so much disappointment and confusion built up around the very idea of art that people find themselves backing away from their own sensations.” So what is the answer? “What we find ourselves craving now is art’s immediacy, art’s particularity. But how do you build an aesthetic out of immediacy and particularity?” The New Republic 09/30/02

EARTHQUAKE DAMAGES SICILIAN MONUMENTS: Officials are toting up damages to monuments and buildings in Sicily after an earthquake September 6. Hundreds of buildings , including the home of the Sicilian parliament, have been declared unsafe. “Of about 40 damaged monuments in the province of Palermo, so far about 10 have been declared unfit for use” and the number could double, say officials. The Art Newspaper 09/27/02

CALL ON QUEEN TO RETURN RARE BRONZE: The former director of the Lagos [Nigeria] National Museum is calling on Queen Elizabeth to return a rare Benin Bronze given to her as a gift in 1973 by Nigerian President Yakubu Gowon. “General Gowon wanted to give something very valuable to The Queen and the fact it had been bought for our museum made it seem even more important. He gave the gift out of love for The Queen, but it was done out of ignorance.” The Art Newspaper 09/27/02

MORE THAN JUST A BATH: The painstaking year-long effort to clean Michelangelo’s David is a sophisticated process. “The year-long campaign will include microclimatic surveillance and gamma-ray testing to reveal the exact nature of the atmospheric deposits, staining and erosion on the statue. Working in tandem with computer-generated models of the statue in a lab in Pisa, the intervention is the largest-scale study ever of what happens to monuments over time – sort of a gerontological study of public art.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/01/02

Theatre: October 2002

Thursday October 31

MOSCOW PRODUCER TO REMOUNT SHOW HELD HOSTAGE: The producer of the show held hostage by Chechen rebels last week in Moscow says he’ll remount the production. Somewhere. “Eighteen members of the show’s cast and crew died in the seige, including two girls aged 13 and 14, and many are still in hospital. He hoped the show, regarded as Russia’s first musical, would eventually be performed again, but never in the same theatre. ‘Even if Moscow authorities rebuild it, this place will remain cursed anyway’.” BBC 10/30/02

MERGER TROUBLES IN CLEVELAND: “The top players in the merger negotiations between Cleveland’s two financially struggling major professional theaters say it’s all about creating a new and exciting company that could make Cleveland one of the best theater towns in the country. But talk to some rank-and-file board members and staffers at the theaters, and the picture that emerges is one in which the Cleveland Play House wants to come out on top, and Great Lakes Theater Festival is struggling to maintain a semblance of an identity.” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 10/31/02

Wednesday October 30

BOMB THREAT CANCELS MOSCOW PRODUCTION OF 42ND STREET: A bomb threat at the Moscow theatre where a traveling production of 42nd Street is playing forced cancellation of the show. The threat was enough for several cast members, who decided to quit the show and leave Russia. “Everyone is trying to find out tonight whether this bomb scare was al-Qaeda or Chechnyan or some random prankster, but the Russian government is not telling us anything, just like they are not telling doctors the gas that they used.” Denver Post 10/30/02

Tuesday October 29

HARLEM FALLING: Harlem Song, currently playing at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre had a lot riding on it. The show chronicles Harlem’s history, and was intended to be a “cornerstone” of the area’s renaissance. It got great reviews, “but the $4 million production has been running at a loss since it opened — most recently about $30,000 a week short of the $200,000 it needs to break even — and the producers said they could not afford to continue.” So produces say it will close if $300,000 can’t be raised by the end of the week. The New York Times 10/29/02

LOOKING GOOD: It’s shaping up as an unusually good year on Broadway. Ticket sales are surging, already there have been two blockbuster hits, a couple more solid contenders, and December (usually a down month) has a calendar stuffed with openings. Dallas Morning News 10/29/02

AYCKBOURN PROTEST STAR TURNS: Prolific playwright Alan Ayckbourn is threatening to quit London’s West End theatre scene. “The dramatist is ‘furious’ that producers in search of new audiences are hiring cinema, pop and television stars at the expense of accomplished stage actors. Sir Alan criticised Madonna’s ‘inaudible’ starring role in David Williamson’s Up for Grabs, which he said was so bad she should have been regarded as a silent exhibit rather than an actor.” The Independent (UK) 10/25/02

JOHN LAHR REMEMBERS ADOPH GREEN: “He could sing a symphony—or, literally, throw himself into song. Head bobbing, voice croaking, arms pinwheeling, Green whipped himself up until he attained full dervishosity. A sort of prodigy of playfulness, he was unabashed by silliness and quite capable of pursuing frivolity to zany heights. In his version of Flight of the Bumble Bee, for instance, he would start as if he were playing the violin, only to end up flitting and buzzing like the bee.” The New Yorker 10/28/02

FRECHETTE WINS CANADA’S RICHEST THEATRE PRIZE: Montreal playwright Carole Fréchette has won the the $100,000 Siminovitch Prize, Canada’s richest theatre prize. Fréchette is the author of eight plays, including the 1995 Governor-General’s Award winning Les Quartres Morts de Marie. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/29/02

Monday October 28

LOOKING TO REGAIN AN EMPIRE: Cameron Mackintosh is one of the biggest producers of Broadway hits ever. But currently he’s only got one show running on the Great White Way. “Mackintosh says Broadway is going through a ‘retro’ wave of upbeat shows centered on familiar material, ‘often rather brilliantly repackaged’.” But things change, he says. And he’s negotiating on his next project. Hartford Courant 10/27/02

DEBBIE DOES BROADWAY: Broadway gets its inspiration from wherever it comes. The latest is from the 70s porn film Debbie Does Dallas. The show was a hit at the recent NY Fringe Festival. “But Debbie, which opens tomorrow night at the Jane Street Theater, is not a salacious spectacle replete with whips and waterbeds. Rather, it’s a cheery sendup of the American Dream, in which innocents awaken to discover the true meaning of supply and demand.” New York Daily News 10/28/02

Sunday October 27

HOW ABOUT TEAMSTERS AS TICKET-TAKERS? “Some London theaters are increasing security in reaction to the siege of a Moscow theater by Chechen rebels, while on Broadway additional measures also have been taken to ensure safety. But most European theater operators said Friday they were satisfied with precautions already in place.” Los Angeles Times (AP) 10/26/02

Friday October 25

ADOLPH GREEN, 87: Adolph Green, half of a songwriting team with Betty Comden, has died. “The best Comden and Green lyrics were brash and buoyant, full of quick wit, best exemplified by New York, New York, an exuberant and forthright hymn to their favorite city. Yet even the songwriters’ biggest pop hits – The Party’s Over, Just in Time and Make Someone Happy – were simple, direct and heartfelt.” Nando Times (AP) 10/24/02

Thursday October 24

BEING TWYLA THARP: Critics have not been kind to the new Twyla Tharp-Billy Joel collaboration slated to hit Broadway this week. Some writers, in fact, savaged the production from top to bottom, and singled out Tharp as an artist who should have known better than to get involved in such a collection of pop dreck. But Tharp, one of the most respected choreographers of her generation, is determined to make the show work, and seems fairly sure that the critics will come around. New York Post 10/24/02

Wednesday October 23

KID APPEAL: How to get kids interested in theatre? “It’s clear that theatre isn’t as irrelevant to young people as we are often told. They’re not alienated by the actual art-form so much as the structures and habits they see imposed on it by the adult world. Think high ticket prices, and hushed, hallowed atmospheres. Think lack of novelty or urgency.” The Guardian (UK) 10/23/02

DRABINSKY CHARGED: Theatre producers Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb have been charged with 19 counts of fraud in Toronto arising from the loss of half a billion dollars to his investors. “One thing even his most unforgiving foes would have to admit is that unlike, say, the disgraced executives in the Enron scandal, Drabinsky was never primarily motivated by an appetite for personal wealth. Throughout his spectacular rise and fall at Cineplex Odeon in the 1980s as well as his tragic second act at Livent in the 1990s, it was always clear Drabinsky was chasing a much bigger dream than money.” Toronto Star 10/23/02

Tuesday October 22

RSC TO ADAPT RUSHDIE: The Royal Shakespeare Company has taken on adapting Salman Rushdie’s book Midnight’s Children for the stage. Up til now the book has been a jinx for anyone trying to adapt it. “The last attempt to transfer the book from the page collapsed twice after first the Indian government, and then the Sri Lankan authorities, caved in to Muslim fundamentalists and refused the BBC permission to film there.” The Guardian (UK) 10/22/02

Sunday October 20

COST OF THE NEW: “Apparently, Canadian theatres love new play development. In the last decade, a veritable industry of script editing (or dramaturgy, as it’s known in the trade) and workshopping has grown up on the national theatre scene, where increasingly the public is invited to watch development work.” But is all the effort and expense worth it? The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/19/02

Friday October 18

FROM STAGE TO SCREEN: More and more stage directors are being recruited to direct movies. “Stage directors, like their film-school-bred counterparts, are storytellers who have to use visual and technical skill to advance a narrative. Hire a theater guy, and quite often you’ll get somebody who is hungry for a challenge, willing to think in innovative ways – and who will know how to talk to actors.” The Star-Tribune (LADN) 10/18/02

Thursday October 17

DIGITAL THEATRE: Think of theatre as an analog experience in a digital era dominated by video? Wrong – today’s theatre productions can employ an astonishing array of high-tech tools to create their magic. “Little more than a decade after a helicopter first landed onstage in the musical Miss Saigon, theatrical designers are stretching the boundaries of what is possible with a variety of new digital tools that allow them to coordinate and control dozens of independent elements – lights, sound, sets and special effects – from a keyboard.” The New York Times 10/17/02

Wednesday October 16

HITTING STRIDE: Margo Lion is a rare breed – an independent Broadway producer among the corporate entities that dominate modern Broadway. But it’s not easy. She has “plugged away for 25 years, struggling to raise money for her projects, putting up her West Side apartment and one piece of good sculpture as collateral; generating theater that was creatively satisfying but rarely commercially successful.” And then came Hairspray… The New York Times 10/16/02

CHANGE ARTISTS: In the past year there has been a big turnover in the top jobs at London’s subsidized theatres. Change of leadership is always disrupting, but each of the theatres (and the new people running them) has their own solutions for how to move on after a departure. The Times (UK) 10/16/02

UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT: “The rumored takeover of [San Francisco’s] Theatre on the Square by Broadway and touring producer Scott E. Nederlander has become fact. The 738-seat house near Union Square will change hands [later this fall]… The deal marks the end of independent producer Jonathan Reinis’ 20-year run at Theatre on the Square. Reinis owns the theater’s name and may retain it for other projects, including a proposed performing arts center at the UC Theatre in downtown Berkeley.” San Francisco Chronicle 10/16/02

LOOK FOR THAT UNION LABEL: In Denver, where the Civic Theatre has been rocked by debt in recent years, a new New York-based producer has been brought in to turn things around, and it didn’t take Mitchell Maxwell long to start making changes. Maxwell has announced that the Civic, previously a non-union theatre, will now work with Actors Equity and pay full union scale to its performers. Maxwell also intends to sell naming rights not only to the theatre itself, but to individual elements such as the stage, the auditorium, and the attached art gallery. Denver Post 10/16/02

Tuesday October 15

READING THE REGIONALS: Britain’s Barclays Theatre Awards point up the insecurity of the country’s regional theatres. The theatres feel they need to hire stars, “because even well established theatre companies alone would not be enough to attract audiences.” But help may be at hand. The government has promised financial help next year and already there are “signs of theatres mounting more ambitious pieces, and getting together to co-produce expensive touring shows.” The Guardian (UK) 10/15/02

KING OF THE MUSICAL: Producer Cameron Mackintosh “likes being number one. In terms of musicals, he has been there for nigh on 20 years, colonising foreign cities with his chorus lines. For Miss Saigon alone, the figures it trails in its shadow are staggering. Performed in 15 countries and 79 cities. Translated into eight languages and winner of 29 major theatre awards. Played to 29 million – million! – people at more than 18,000 performances.” The Scotsman 10/14/02

THE MUPPETS GO TO KABUL: After Afghan kids fall in love with a Muppet, creators of the puppets make new Afghan muppets and take them in a show to the war-torn country. BBC 10/15/02

Monday October 14

VANYA (AND MIKHAIL AND SERGEI) ON 42ND STREET: It was supposed to be a historic moment in post-Soviet cultural development in Russia – the first big-time Broadway musical to make it’s way to Russia, complete with all the bells and whistles of a touring show in the States. It turned into a nightmare, with the American director lamenting the unwillingness of the Russian production team to take direction, with a last-minute Russian translation broadcast over headphones being the final straw.. “A character called ‘Anytime Annie’ in the English version had become ‘Annie Spread Your Legs.’ References to hookers and Viagra were littered throughout the script… One line, someone saying to a chorus girl: ‘Hey Ethel — must have been hard on your mother not having any children’, was changed to: ‘Hey, Ethel, too bad your mother didn’t get an abortion.'” Washington Post 10/14/02

Sunday October 13

IS BROADWAY BAD FOR THEATRE? For decades, the progression of a given play or musical from one of America’s regional theatre centers to the bright lights of Broadway has been largely unchanged. New productions are shuffled off to a regional the way newly drafted baseball players are sent to the minors for seasoning, and brought up to the big time when they are deemed to have worked out all the kinks. But in the last few years, regional theatre has begun to rethink its role in the process, and some have begun to question whether the Broadway Way is really the right way? “Some critics such as Robert Brustein, retired founding artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre, have argued repeatedly and vehemently that producing shows that are bound for Broadway inevitably compromises the artistic integrity of regional theaters – that it undermines the ‘mission’ of nonprofit theater, which is to create and nurture artistry and new work.” Boston Globe 10/13/02

THEY’RE SO CUTE AT THIS AGE: In the age of star-driven theatre productions, who to give first billing is usually not an issue. But what do you do when Dame Maggie Smith and Dame Judi Dench are both starring in your play? And once you’ve figured out the billing order, who gets the prime dressing room? These things may seem minor to the public, but actors have walked out of productions over their placement on promotional material, and such ‘exposure issues’ are considered a very big deal in the theatrical community. The Observer (UK) 10/13/02

DENVER CIVIC TO GET A DOSE OF NEW YORK: “Control of the debt-ridden Denver Civic Theater is expected to be transferred Oct. 21 to prolific and at times controversial New York producer Mitchell Maxwell, The Denver Post has learned. Maxwell said he plans to reopen the theater’s two performing spaces and art gallery May 1, along with an on-site, late-night cafe-restaurant… Maxwell may turn out to be the savior of the Civic, but he has detractors, most notably a New York Post columnist who dubbed him ‘Lord of the Flops’ after his Bells Are Ringing closed on Broadway in June 2001.” Denver Post 10/13/02

Friday October 11

THREE SF THEATRES TO CLOSE: Three San Francisco theatre houses are shutting down because of a downturn in business. The 240-seat Mason Street Theatre and adjacent 80-seat Union Square announced their closings this week, following news that the 738-seat Theatre on the Square would close at the end of the year. “The phones used to ring two to three times a week with producers in search of a theater. That just died.” San Francisco Chronicle 10/11/02

LONDON CALLING: Why are American movie stars so anxious to perform on London stages? Maybe it’s because they feel that “Americans tend to fare better treading the boards here than they do in their own country. The perception among many American stars is that the critical piranhas lie mercilessly in wait on Broadway, where seeing a film star on stage isn’t such a novelty.” The Times 10/11/02

RERUN: Broadway is full of revivals this season. “The rationale among the high-minded is that producers serve as enlightened curators, like those in art museums, preserving and reinterpreting classics for new audiences and that plays can only benefit from a revival. The less stated fact is that producers minimize financial risk by relying on a familiar formula. But are current shows worth an audience paying new money for an old formula?” Christian Science Monitor 10/11/02

Thursday October 10

PROOF’S LONG RUN: Successful musicals run for years and years on Broadway. Plays, on the other hand, are more ephemeral. A very successful play will last a year. When Proof closes in January it will be the longest-running play in the past 20 years after playing 918 performances and 16 previews. (there’s a list of longest-running Broadway plays of all time at the end of this article). Playbill 10/09/02

Wednesday October 9

CUTTING OFF A CRITIC: Toronto’s Canadian Stage has refused to issue anymore review tickets to CBC critic Lynn Slotkin, calling her reviews “consistently mean-spirited, negative and personal.” It’s not about bad reviews, the theatre says – rather it’s her tone that annoys them… National Post 10/09/02

Monday October 7

OH MY MIMI: Director Baz Luhrmann loves to reinvent. His new take on La Bohème is “about to land slap-bang in the middle of Broadway, with all the attendant razzmatazz. And it’s not cut, translated or otherwise jazzed-up or dumbed-down either: every note of the score will be sung and played by trained singers and a full orchestra.This crazy and wonderful project has a long history.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/07/02

THE POOR OLD RSC: The Royal Shakespeare Company is a shambles. Abandoning the Barbican, hiring celebrities, a Bard theme park, talk of knocking down its Stratford home, turnover at the top… The company has so many problems it’s difficult to know where to start in fixing them. How did a venerable company get into so much trouble? The Guardian (UK) 10/07/02

Sunday October 6

NEW THEATRES FOR NEW REALITIES: The South Coast Repertory Theatre in Southern California is one of America’s more robust regional theatres. This weekend the SCR unveiled its reconfingured home – a “three-venue, 78,000-square- foot complex that rivals the finest in the country.” Its transformation reflects the changes that regional non-profit theatre has undergone in the past decade. Orange County Register 10/06/02

TROUBLE ON BROADWAY? Sure Hairspray‘s a big hit on Broadway this season. But beyond that, “a number of long-running productions – the foundation of Broadway’s cumulative box-office tally – are showing significant slippage.” Les Miz is closing after 16 years, and several other old-timers are reporting greatly reduced business. And “there are no sure things among the new contenders – and there’s already a whiff of trouble among a few of them.” Hartford Courant 10/06/02

MUSICAL MAKEOVER: There was a time that movie musicals were very popular. Those days are long gone now. So some reinvention is in order. “In the last three years, the salvage operation has become an international project, with directors as dissimilar as Lars von Trier (Danish), Baz Luhrmann (Australian) and most recently François Ozon (French) trotting out ambitious idiosyncratic test models of a new and improved 21st-century movie musical.” The New York Times 10/06/02

DO THEY WANT WHAT WE’RE OFFERING? It’s so easy to blame a downturn in ticket sales to 9/11 and an economic downturn. These are certainly the excuses du jour. But a couple of Denver theatres wonder if their decline in business has something more to do with the kind of product they’re offering. Denver Post 10/06/02

Friday October 4

FOGGY BOTTOM: The American Guild of Musical Artists has laid out new rules for the use of fog onstage. The new rules come after a battle with San Francisco Opera where onstage performers complained stage fog was making them ill. “People have been getting sick; been hospitalized; some have been directly incapacitated by smoke and fog; others have been incapacitated later and believe that smoke and fog is the cause of their problems.” Backstage 10/03/02

WHY ACTING SUCKS: “There isn’t anything the matter with drama schools. But there’s everything imaginable the matter with what happens to the young actor when he or she leaves drama school. That first year out of work is complete hell. A lot of the good work that happened in those three years can get thrown out of the window. If you spend years studying and then all you have is two days on The Bill, you become cynical, unless you have the spiritual resources of the Dalai Lama. The whole pick-up-and-drop theatre system all over the west, where we don’t have permanent ensembles, is terrible for self-esteem.” Financial Times 10/04/02

ONLY IN NEW YORK: In most cities, patrons arriving at a theater and being asked to shell out $115 for a single ticket to a play would hoot with laughter, and then go see a movie. In New York, such unconscionable gouging apparently just makes the lines longer. Of course, it doesn’t hurt when the play in question, (which has now set the record for highest ever off-Broadway ticket price) stars Al Pacino, Billy Crudup, John Goodman, and Steve Buscemi, most of whom, let’s face it, don’t show up in those other cities a whole lot anyway. The New York Times 10/04/02

Thursday October 3

BARBICAN TO COMPETE WITH SHAKESPEARE: The Barbican says it will start producing Shakespeare – without the Royal Shakespeare Company. The Barbican had been the RSC’s longtime home until leaving in March for the West End. The new competition is chilling news. In the last year the RSC has “lost an artistic director, audiences, and, some say, its way. Now it will have to contend with new competition. The Guardian (UK) 10/03/02

NOT SUCH A MISERABLE RUN: Les Miserables is closing on Broadway after 15 years. It opened March 12, 1987 and has been seen by some 9 million people on Broadway as well as millions more at road productions. The show won 8 Tonys, including Best Musical and the Broadway production has grossed $390 million so far. Still, the show has been selling less than half its seats, and with a large cast, it has substantial weekly running costs. Playbill 10/02/02

DELUSIONS OF POWER: New Republic theatre critic Robert Brustein speaks in Australia about arts criticism. Deploring ‘Himalaya criticism’- brief, opinionated, polarised, either total approval or scathing, destructive and reputation-destroying denunciation – he pointed to the appalling power of The New York Times’ drama critic to close shows.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/03/02

Wednesday October 2

THE SUGAR MAN: French Canadian songwriter Luc Plamondon is the Andrew Lloyd Webber of French musical theatre. His Starmania, which “opened in Paris 23 years ago, is the most successful French-language musical ever (as of today, more than three million people have seen it on stage and five million albums have been sold) and 1998’s Notre Dame de Paris was another smashing success. A favourite songwriter of Celine Dion, Plamondon is not embarrassed by sentiment. It’s safe to say his songs make Elton John look like an ironist.” Now he’s got a new show – a remake of Cinderella... The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/02/02

Dance: October 2002

Monday October 29

DANCE 10, SONGS 10 (IF YOU LIKE BILLY): The Twyla Tharp/Billy Joel Broadway collaboration continues to get respectful reviews. Joan Accocella: “At this point, Tharp needs no arguing for as a choreographer. She is the most inventive dance-maker of her generation, and her crossing of classical ballet with popular forms, which in other hands might have been tendentious (‘We’ll show those ballet snobs’)—and, come to think of it, was a little tendentious, once, even in her hands—has by now yielded her a full, eloquent, and unself-conscious language.” The New Yorker 10/28/02

ON THE LINE: Three years of intense training for Australia’s top young dancers culminates with a single event – a pas de deux exhibition that could make their careers. “Watching closely is David McAllister, the Australian Ballet’s artistic director. He has between three and five places available for next year. On stage tonight are 14 talented young dancers, all desperately wanting one of them. The dancers know that most of them will miss out.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/29/02

MACMILLAN CHARGES ROYAL INCOMPETENCE: One of the reasons Ross Stretton was forced out as director of the Royal Ballet was because Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s widow was ready to withdraw rights for his work. She says Stretton was just a small problem compared to the general incompetence of the Royal’s management. “We are talking about a huge business at Covent Garden, about people’s livelihoods. Though I don’t have any argument with the Royal Ballet’s professional managers, unfortunately, in dance terms, the Opera House has had at its helm a bunch of amateurs.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/29/02

Sunday October 27

ABT, BACK AND BETTER THAN EVER? It was only a year ago that the future of the American Ballet Theatre seemed decidedly uncertain, with lawsuits and backstage infighting overshadowing what should have been a period of celebrated artistic growth within the company. But these days, with a new management team in place and cooler heads prevailing, the ABT is reintroducing itself to the American dance scene, with a well-reviewed New York production celebrating the diverse music of Richard Rodgers and George Harrison. Chicago Tribune 10/27/02

Friday October 25

IF IT WALKS LIKE A DUCK… The Twyla Tharp/Billy Joel project now on Broadway is playing in a theatre theatre, writes Clive Barnes. “But if it looks like a ballet, sounds like a ballet, feels like a ballet and dances like a ballet – it is a ballet, the first full-evening Broadway ballet, at least since Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake a few years back got Broadway’s feet wet. No praise can be too high for the dancing.” New York Post 10/25/02

  • THE MOVEMENT BEHIND THE CLICHES: Ben Brantley writes that Tharp’s choreographic dynamic “keeps you engaged through what, baldly described, sounds like a snoozy series of clichés — the kinds of things regularly sung about, as a matter of fact, in Top 40 pop ballads of the 1970’s. Yet Ms. Tharp and her vivid team of dancers unearth the reasons certain clichés keep resonating and, more important, make them gleam as if they had just been minted.” The New York Times 10/25/02

ABT’S NEW BEATLES HIT: “American Ballet Theatre’s tribute to George Harrison, Within You Without You, given its world premiere at City Center last weekend, is not the first Beatles ballet, but it is the most ambitious. What could have been a gimmick has emerged as a signature piece for ABT.” New York Post 10/25/02

Tuesday October 22

IS DEREK DEANE RIGHT FOR THE ROYAL BALLET? Who will be the Royal Ballet’s next artistic director? “Typical wish-lists can be broadly divided into three categories: superstars, old boys and wannabes. Big names such as Mark Morris, Mikhail Baryshnikov or ABT’s Kevin McKenzie might have international cachet but the house’s arcane management structure and its reputation for ancestor worship might prove hard to bear.” So what about cheeky former English National director Derek Deane? The Telegraph (UK) 10/22/02

TWYLA’S LABEL PROBLEM: So just what do you call the new Twyla Tharp/Billy Joel collaboration that’s hit Broadway? It’s not really a musical. Not strictly dance either. Is it art? A pop entertainment? “I just think dance is very grand. And I think it’s very, very capable – dance can express anything. So you tell me if it’s art.” New York Magazine 10/21/02

Monday October 21

STRIVING TO THRIVE: Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal is one of Canada’s major dance companies. But it’s currently in reduced circumstances, and most of its 35 members have been with the company only a few seasons. “Depending on how one looks at it, Les Grands can be thought of as either the most versatile or the least consistent of Canada’s major ballet companies.” Toronto Star 10/19/02

SOUTH CAROLINA’S NEW BALLET: South Carolina’s Greenville Ballet has changed its name to South Carolina Ballet, and has ambitious plans to grow a professional resident company. “For now, the company will work with guest artistic directors and professional dancers. However, by the 2003-04 season, South Carolina Ballet hopes to have its own corps of professional dancers in place.” Greenville News (SC) 10/19/02

Sunday October 20

THE NEW CLASSICS: Remakes of old ballets are an enduring tradition. But “the newest ballet remakes, created by a generation of mostly European choreographers, are different: They want audiences to remember the originals. Many of them prove daring about nudity and sex. Others put classically trained dancers through deliberately anti-classical moves to blur the line between ballet and modern dance. But the biggest change may be their sense of historical precedent. These ballets build on the past and acknowledge it every step of the way.” Los Angeles Times 10/20/02

Friday October 18

DANCING ON SCREEN: “The art of the dance film, a marriage of two art forms as old as the first moving pictures, grows more innovative by the year. No longer a simple matter of turning a camera on a stage performance, dance film and video makers borrow from music videography, from animation and computer-generated film techniques, and from stage technology to create choreography not only seen through the lens but created by contemporary audio-visual capabilities.” Toronto Star 10/18/02

Wednesday October 16

STAR POWER: Dance is a hard sell to a wider audience. Maybe what’s needed is some compelling star personalities… The Telegraph (UK) 10/16/02

Friday October 11

WHO OWNS DANCE? Once a dance is created, its recreation often depends on the memories or records of those who were there at the creation. But who owns the work once the choreographer is gone? “Questions revolve around whether choreographers in fact own their own dances and even wanted those dances to be seen after their deaths.” The New York Times 10/10/02

Wednesday October 9

ROYAL BALLET REMAKES ITS SEASON: After ousting Ross Stretton from the top job at the Royal Ballet in London, the company has dramatically remade its schedule for the current season, dropping ballets and changing soloists. The Guardian (UK) 10/09/02

ALBERTA BOUNCES BACK: A year ago, Alberta Ballet was staring at a $460,000 deficit on a $6-million budget. As anyone in the arts world knows, the past year has been an even worse one financially than the year before. So it was a big surprise last week when Alberta Ballet announced it “has not only eradicated the deficit but even managed to post an accumulated surplus of $44,500.” The financial feat has not been accomplished without some pain, however… National Post (Canada) 10/09/02

Tuesday October 8

ROYAL BALLET IN NO RUSH: London’s Royal Ballet says it is in no rush to appoint a new artistic director, after Ross Stretton was forced out of the job last week. “It has dismissed as speculation reports that the artistic director of the American Ballet Theatre, is the front-runner to take over following the resignation of Ross Stretton.” BBC 10/07/02

Sunday October 6

SAN FRANCISCO CONNECTION: “Unlike other world-class ensembles, San Francisco Ballet does not have a first-rate ‘heritage repertory,’ a repository of great works that grounds a company even as it is building its future.” But in the 17 years since former New York City Ballet star Helgi Tomasson took over the San Francisco Ballet, “he has transformed a respected regional company with a Balanchine tradition into an internationally prominent one, known for the excellence of its dancers and the smartness of its repertory.” The New York Times 10/06/02

Friday October 4

ABT HEAD IN RUNNING FOR ROYAL JOB: Kevin McKenzie is the early frontrunner to take the artistic director job at London’s Royal Ballet. For the past decade, McKenzie has been artistic director of American Ballet Theatre in New York. “Ironically, the former dancer… is the man who plucked the Australian choreographer Ross Stretton from relative obscurity.” Stretton was pushed out of the Royal last week after only a year on the job. The Guardian (UK) 10/04/02

  • BROKEN SYSTEM: Ross Stretton’s quick ouster from the artistic helm of the Royal Ballet has less to do with the kind of job he did than with the deeply flawed process by which he was chosen. The governance of the Royal is an impossible concoction that breeds a culture of irresponsibility, writes Norman Lebrecht. “The artists who risk limb and sometimes life in performance, are obliged to doff their caps to dilettantes and are the last to be told of decisions that affect and often prejudice their individual and collective destinies.” London Evening Standard 10/03/02

People: October 2002

Thursday October 31

HOW TO WRITE BOOKS AND INFLUENCE GOVERNMENTS: Greek author Vassilis Vassilikos may be the embodiment of the old literary cliche about the pen and the sword. He may just be the only author on earth who can claim that one of his books helped to bring down a military dictatorship. And yet, Vassilikos, who has penned 98 books over a career which spans a half-century, does not get caught up in the power and glory of it all. “I am known as a political writer but I think of myself more as a writer of erotic novels.” Toronto Star 10/31/02

Tuesday October 29

JOHN LAHR REMEMBERS ADOPH GREEN: “He could sing a symphony—or, literally, throw himself into song. Head bobbing, voice croaking, arms pinwheeling, Green whipped himself up until he attained full dervishosity. A sort of prodigy of playfulness, he was unabashed by silliness and quite capable of pursuing frivolity to zany heights. In his version of Flight of the Bumble Bee, for instance, he would start as if he were playing the violin, only to end up flitting and buzzing like the bee.” The New Yorker 10/28/02

Monday October 28

SO WHO IS DANA GIOIA? Nominated by President Bush to be chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia is “a writer with a background as a businessman. He is a registered Republican who voted for George W. Bush and for his father before that. His poetry is not political. His criticism, essays and reviews are not polemical. Rather, Mr. Gioia appears to be someone with a wide range of artistic and intellectual interests who is passionate about making poetry more accessible to the public. Yes, his essay Can Poetry Matter?, which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1991 and then in a collection of his essays, angered academics because he accused them of making poetry an insular enterprise.” The New York Times 10/28/02

MARTEL’S ‘OVERNIGHT’ SUCCESS: Last week Yann Martel won the Booker Prize. Not many had heard of him before that. He got only a $20,000 for Canadian rights to Life of Pi, US$75,000 for US rights and was turned down by five UK publishers before getting $36,000 for the UK rights from a struggling publisher. For four years those advances were his only income. “I could only do it because I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t have a car. I have roommates. I wear second-hand clothes. I have no TV. I have no stereo. My only expenses are my notebooks and my computer.” National Post (Canada) 10/28/02

Sunday October 27

VIDAL SAVAGES BUSH ADMINISTRATION: “America’s most controversial writer, Gore Vidal, has launched the most scathing attack to date on George W Bush’s Presidency, calling for an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda’s plans. Vidal’s highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled ‘The Enemy Within’ argues that what he calls a ‘Bush junta’ used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home.” The Observer (UK) 10/27/02

CAMELOT’S KING PASSES: “Richard Harris, the voluble Irishman who starred as King Arthur in the film version of “Camelot” and more recently played Albus Dumbledore, the wise, magical and benign headmaster in the first Harry Potter movie and its forthcoming sequel, died yesterday in London. He was 72.” The New York Times 10/26/02

BELLESILES RESIGNS FROM EMORY: “Historian Michael A. Bellesiles, author of a controversial 2000 book on gun ownership in early America, resigned from Emory University in Atlanta yesterday after a devastating indictment of his research was made by an outside committee of scholars… Mainstream scholars raised questions [in 2001] about research Bellesiles did into probate records. His credibility problems were compounded when he said that he had lost all of his research notes in a flood at Emory.” Boston Globe 10/26/02

THE NEW WAVE: “Every half century, history rolls at us another wave of composers who will change the way music is heard and played. At the beginning of the 20th century came Debussy and Schoenberg, soon joined by Bartok and Stravinsky. In the 1950’s, those arriving ranged from John Cage to Milton Babbitt. Now it is time for another great sweep, perhaps going in even more diverse directions and prompted from farther out on the periphery. The 20th century’s revolutions were led from Europe and then the United States; now may come the turn of China, Australia and Latin America.” Exhibit A may be Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov. The New York Times 10/27/02

Friday October 25

ADOLPH GREEN, 87: Adolph Green, half of a songwriting team with Betty Comden, has died. “The best Comden and Green lyrics were brash and buoyant, full of quick wit, best exemplified by New York, New York, an exuberant and forthright hymn to their favorite city. Yet even the songwriters’ biggest pop hits – The Party’s Over, Just in Time and Make Someone Happy – were simple, direct and heartfelt.” Nando Times (AP) 10/24/02

  • REMEMBERING COMDEN & GREEN: “They represented the ultimate New York chic in a downtown way, with a rollicking playfulness and perhaps just a touch of sweet-yet-sophisticated sadness.” Hartford Courant 10/25/02

Wednesday October 23

HOUELLEBECQ CLEARED BY FRENCH COURT: French writer Michel Houellebecq has been cleared of inciting racial hatred by saying Islam was ‘the stupidest religion’. A panel of three judges in Paris declared that the author was not guilty after he was sued by four Muslim groups. He made the comments in an interview with the literary magazine Lire in 2001. The case was seen as an important battle between free speech and religious conservatism.” BBC 10/23/02

DRABINSKY CHARGED: Theatre producers Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb have been charged with 19 counts of fraud in Toronto arising from the loss of half a billion dollars to his investors. “One thing even his most unforgiving foes would have to admit is that unlike, say, the disgraced executives in the Enron scandal, Drabinsky was never primarily motivated by an appetite for personal wealth. Throughout his spectacular rise and fall at Cineplex Odeon in the 1980s as well as his tragic second act at Livent in the 1990s, it was always clear Drabinsky was chasing a much bigger dream than money.” Toronto Star 10/23/02

THE MAN CHALLENGING COPYRIGHT: Eric Eldred is a quiet, unassuming man. But his case before the US Supreme Court challenging the 1998 copyright extension law could change the course of creative history. “At 59, he is unassuming, shy, and soft-spoken. Yet his passion for publishing on the Internet is unmistakable. He envisions a society in which literacy and democracy are advanced through the online dissemination and discussion of great literature. Literature, he says, should not be ‘locked up in a library and accessible [only] to high priests of academia … People have as much power as a printing press’ in their own computers.” Chronicle of Higher Education 10/25/02

SD GLOBE THEATRE HIRES SPISTO: Louis Spisto has been named executive director of the Globe Theatres in San Diego. Spisto is former exec director of American Ballet Theatre and the Pacific Symphony. “Spisto resigned from ABT under pressure in 2001, after several staff resignations, rocky relations with some board members, and an ousted employee’s claim of sex and age discrimination.”But the Globe says: “The controversy “doesn’t say as much about Lou as it does about that organization, which has a history of dysfunctional situations with its leaders.”
Los Angeles Times 10/23/02

Monday October 21

KEITH JARRETT’S NEW STYLE: Pianist Keith Jarrett became ill six years ago, and during the long rehabilitation when he didn’t play, Jarrett re-evaluated his art. “I didn’t like a lot of my long introductions, and there were lots of things I wasn’t happy with about my touch. My illness gave me an opportunity that very few musicians have, to re-evaluate everything. I wanted to reconnect to the idea of sounding like a horn — a trumpet or saxophone.” The Times (UK) 10/21/02

GREATEST BRITON EVER? Who is the greatest Briton ever? The BBC is taking a poll. Of the finalists, “only three of the top 10 are from the 20th century – John Lennon, Winston Churchill and Princess Diana. Three are scientists or engineers – Brunel, Darwin and Newton – and three are national leaders – Cromwell, Elizabeth I and Churchill.” BBC 10/20/02

Sunday October 20

THE DAVE EGGERS PUZZLE: Dave Eggers’ new book is being self-published and he’s giving away the money earned from it. With the success of his last book he could have done anything he wanted. “He’s so averse to promoting himself that it is the canniest act of self-promotion. He really doesn’t care – really. But that’s hard for anyone in the frenzy business to believe.” Los Angeles Times 10/20/02

RUNNING ON ABOUT RENEE: Renee Fleming is the diva of the moment. She’s a breakout artist who’s fame surpasses the concert hall. “One measure of her special hold on the American public is the constant stream of feature articles that have brought her personal history into the household of anyone who watches television or subscribes to magazines. Her girl-next-door upbringing. Her initial uncertainties in finding her direction as a classical musician. Her seemingly picture-perfect marriage.. The New York Times 10/20/02

Friday October 18

SCHAMA COMES OUT: Simon Schama is the most popular TV historian in Britain, a star who gets recognized on the street. “He is an intellectual superstar, a professor at Columbia in New York, where tickets for his lectures on art history and history are traded by touts. Last year, his colossal popularity helped sales of history books in Britain exceed, for the first time, those of cookery books, and applications to study history at university are increasing.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/18/02

Thursday October 17

BUFORD TO LEAVE NYer EDITOR JOB: Bill Buford, who has been The New Yorker’s fiction editor since 1994, is leaving the job to be the magazine’s European correspondent. “In a way, it’s going from the best editing job in town to the best writing job in town-except it’s not in town.” New York Observer 10/16/02

Wednesday October 16

MORE AMBROSE DEBATE: Some critics felt that obituaries of the historian Stephen Ambrose glossed over reports of his plagiarism, but Tim Rutten detected the opposite bias, singling out the Boston Globe as the most egregious Ambrose-basher, and pointing out that paraphrase (and footnoted paraphrase, at that) is very different from plagiarism. “All synoptic, narrative historians, which is what Ambrose was, paraphrase from other sources. If the standards laid down by his most rabid critics were applied to the four Evangelists, the three Synoptic Gospels would have to be denounced as acts of plagiarism–as would a substantial and revered part of the extant medieval corpus.” Los Angeles Times 10/16/02

Tuesday October 15

YOUNG AT HEART: Two weeks ago Simone Young was fired as general director of Opera Australia. But not right away; she’ll stay on running the company until her contract is up next year. Isn’t it awkward working for the people who just fired you? Sure. But in the meantime there are operas to be produced, audiences to be made happy… The Age (Melbourne) 10/15/02

FRIDA FETISH: Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is “currently the height of radical chic, and is likely to be even more in vogue when Julie Taymor’s movie Frida, starring Salma Hayek, opens next year. But it is hard not to feel that there is something distasteful and unhealthy about the way we like our artists – particularly if they are women – to suffer. Would there be half as much interest in Kahlo’s paintings if her life had been half as colourful and tragic?” The Guardian (UK) 10/14/02

THE HIDDEN AMBROSE: Why did obituaries of author Stephen Ambrose gloss over his plagiarism? “Ambrose’s pilferage was much more than a slip-up in a ‘couple of books.’ As the Weekly Standard, Forbes.com, and New York Times proved in one damning week last January, Ambrose plagiarized all the time.” Slate 10/14/02

Monday October 14

COVENT GARDEN’S NEW MAN: Anthony Pappano is Covent Garden’s new music director. It’s a big and controversial position, the kind of job you have to grow into. But Pappano has confidence. “I think the house feels a new energy because I am always here and going to rehearsals and sort of going at 100 miles per hour all the time. And this opera house has needed that kind of investment.” The New York Times 10/14/02

THE TRUTH ABOUT MARIA: A doctor who treated Maria Callas for dermatomyositis, a degenerative tissue disease, is speaking out about the famed soprano’s illness more than 25 years after her death because, he says, he has been incensed by ongoing portrayals of Callas as a disturbed prima donna who retired from the stage as a result of mental instabilities. The doctor further asserts that the diva’s death in 1977 came not as a result of heartbreak (her husband abandoned her to marry Jacqueline Kennedy) but from a heart attack brought on by her disease. Andante (AP) 10/14/02

DEFINING MOMENT: Connecticut arts leaders were surprised when Kate Sellers resigned as director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art earlier this month in the middle of raising $120 million for an expansion. “Sellers’ walking away from what would have been a career-defining moment, at one of the most pivotal periods in the museum’s 160-year history, makes one wonder what was going on…” Hartford Courant 10/14/02

ARCHER ESCAPES PUNISHMENT: Writer, former MP (and convicted felon) Jeffrey Archer has escaped punishment for breaking prison rules and publishing a diary he wrote while in his cell. “Archer, 62, had his £12-a-day prison earnings stopped for 14 days and was banned from using the prison canteen for two weeks. The punishment was suspended for six months” if Archer doesn’t break the rules again. The Times (UK) 10/11/02

  • ARCHER’S BANAL DIARY: What about Archer’s “literary” impressions of prison life? “Completely worthless from the literary point of view, and relentlessly banal in thought, observation and analysis, they are nonetheless revealing: of Lord Archer’s mind and personality rather than of the prison system. And to be privy to Archer’s mind in full cry is a depressing experience indeed.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/14/02
  • Previously: LETTER FROM PRISON: Jeffrey Archer’s diary from prison describing his life there is being published and serialized in the Daily Mail next week. But prison authorities say the diary may break prison rules. “He can’t make money while he is a serving prisoner from publications and I have a duty to protect the privacy of other prisoners and members of staff. He has to respect that.” If he has broken rules, time may be added to his sentence. The Guardian (UK) 10/05/02

Sunday October 13

BEVERLY’S BACK: Was it really only six months ago that Beverly Sills resigned her post at the head of New York’s Lincoln Center, following a contentious debate over the complex’s impending expansion and renovation? At the time, Sills said that she was retiring, and wanted to “smell the flowers a little bit.” But apparently the quiet life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be for Sills, 73, who has just accepted the chairmanship of the Metropolitan Opera. The Met is, of course, Lincoln Center’s most powerful tenant, putting Sills smack in the middle of the same debates she so recently bowed out of. The New York Times 10/12/02

STEPHEN AMBROSE, 66: Stephen Ambrose, the eminent historian whose colloquial style made him a bestselling author as well as a respected researcher, has died at the age of 66 after a long battle with lung cancer. Ambrose had lately been battling charges of plagiarism in several of his works. The New York Times (AP) 10/13/02

Thursday October 10

THE RADICALIZATION OF LARRY LESSIG: Lawrence Lessig is taking on the business that controls big entertainment. This week he’s arguing his case before the US Supreme Court. “The entertainment industry, Lessig believes, is locking up old movies, books and songs that long ago should have transcended private ownership and become the property of the people. At stake, he says, is not only our common cultural heritage, but also the freedom that writers and musicians and filmmakers must have to interpret, reinterpret, adapt, borrow, sample, mock, imitate, parody, criticize – the very lifeblood of the creative process. But Lessig doesn’t merely want to free the past. He wants to free the future as well.” Chicago Tribune 10/10/02

THINK OF IT AS A HIGH BUDGET LOVE-IN: Yoko Ono has never shied away from controversy. That much can be agreed upon by all. And Ms. Ono has come a long way from her days staring down the TV cameras while lying naked in a bed with John Lennon. This week, Ono, now a successful artist in her own right, “bestowed the first Lennon Ono Grant for Peace to Israeli Zvi Goldstein and Palestinian Khalil Rabah on Wednesday at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, for their efforts to remain “creative and inspirational” amid the tensions of war.” The grant is US$50,000, and was presented on what would have been Lennon’s 62nd birthday. BBC 10/10/02

Wednesday October 9

BACK TO TELL ABOUT IT: “Gabriel García Márquez, the 1982 Nobel laureate from Colombia and the foremost author in Latin America, learned in 1999 that he had lymphatic cancer. He promptly cloistered himself with a single-minded pursuit not seen perhaps since he wrote the 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, in a little more than a year, his only vice a steady supply of cigarettes provided by his wife, Mercedes.” Now he’s about to release “what may be his most-awaited book, Vivir Para Contarla, or To Live to Tell It.” The New York Times 10/09/02

Tuesday October 8

OHNESORG RESIGNS BERLIN: Deutsche Presse-Agentur is reporting that Franz Xaver Ohnesorg, general manager of the Berlin Philharmonic, will step down from the job January 1, 2003. The orchestra says he’s leaving for personal reasons. Before going to Berlin Ohnesorg had a short and stormy stint running Carnegie Hall in New York. Andante (DPA) 10/08/02

Monday October 7

LEONARDO’S HUMBLE ORIGINS: Was Leonardo da Vinci the son of a Middle Eastern slave. After 25 years of research the director of an Italian museum located near the Leonardo’s birthplace in Tuscany has concluded as much… Discovery 09/26/02

Sunday October 6

LETTER FROM PRISON: Jeffrey Archer’s diary from prison describing his life there is being published and serialized in the Daily Mail next week. But prison authorities say the diary may break prison rules. “He can’t make money while he is a serving prisoner from publications and I have a duty to protect the privacy of other prisoners and members of staff. He has to respect that.” If he has broken rules, time may be added to his sentence. The Guardian (UK) 10/05/02

Friday October 4

20 SHORT YEARS WITHOUT GLENN GOULD: “If you’re reading this at 11: 30 a.m., it is precisely 20 years since Glenn Gould left this life… Gould must be seen as Canada’s greatest contribution to classical music, as his work continues to inspire a seemingly endless stream of books, films, documentaries and miscellaneous other monuments and remembrances in all corners of the world. He once said that be didn’t believe anybody would come to his funeral. Three thousand people did, and every day many thousands more continue to pay homage to the man by listening to his music over and over again.” Ottawa Citizen 10/04/02

WHERE THE SNOBBERY IS: Maurice Sendak’s illustrations are unmistakable, and his drawings for such children’s classics as Where the Wild Things Are made him a legend to generations of young readers. But like so many popular artists before and after him, Sendak has some trouble being taken as a serious artist. “Snobbery is the biggest obstacle to him being recognized as a fine artist,” says Nichols Clark, director of the new Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. “And it’s not just Sendak. There are many illustrators who are far better artists than those who consider themselves fine artists.” The Christian Science Monitor 10/04/02

Thursday October 3

BARENBOIM THE PEACEMAKER: Israeli conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim, who has made waves in the Middle East twice in recent months, has co-authored a new book with Palestinian intellectual Edward Said calling for peace in the region. “The book, titled Parallels and Paradoxes, grew out of conversations between the two friends, both prominent cultural figures who first met a decade ago by chance at a London hotel… Last month, [Barenboim] and Said were named the winners of Spain’s Prince of Asturias Concord Prize for their efforts toward bringing peace to the Middle East.” Andante (AP) 10/03/02

Wednesday October 2

DEUTSCHE OPER DIRECTOR TO QUIT: Deutsche Oper director Udo Zimmermann is quitting the company after his contract expires next July. Zimmermann says he “found himself unable to continue ‘his sophisticated artistic concept in the Deutsche Oper beyond the 2002-3 season,’ in part because of the Berlin’s poor financial condition and the opera’s $1.7 million deficit. Washington Post (AP) 10/02/02

Tuesday October 1

RUSH TO RELEVANCE: Salman Rushdie has, “in the last few years, fallen from vogue, but the events of the world have conspired to prove his enduring relevance. If Rushdie has yet to develop a specific American aesthetic, his career has nevertheless given him a special understanding of the challenges this country is currently facing.” Salon 10/01/02

Music: October 2002

Thursday October 31

DOING THINGS THE CALGARY WAY: To most Canadians, Calgary, Alberta, is the Cowboy City, a remote Western outpost boasting plenty of corporate bigwigs and independent-minded entrepreneurs, but little in the way of such traditional urban accessories as culture, art, or music. That view of the city appeared to be supported by last month’s collapse of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, which closed up shop (at least temporarily) with nary a peep to be heard from the moneyed classes. One local columnist even suggested that the CPO deserved to die because his CD of the Berlin Philharmonic sounded better. But the CPO may yet have life, thanks to some distinctly Calgarian efforts from a local real estate magnate, and speculation has begun about what other work will be required to reinvigorate the ensemble. Calgary Herald 10/31/02

WATCH THE PAINT DRY LIVE! The renovation of Milan’s famed La Scala opera house is causing no small amount of controversy among Italy’s notoriously belligerant opera fans, due in large part to a modernist design which has raised the hackles of traditionalists. Now, the city of Milan has mounted a web site which will show the progress of the renovation and offer notes on the design. Andante (ADN Kronos) 10/31/02

Wednesday October 30

DETROIT SEES RED: Add the Detroit Symphony to the list of American orchestras posting deficits. The $500,000 shortfall on a budget of $28 million is smaller than other major orchestras, but it’s the second year in a row the DSO has failed to balance its books. Detroit Free Press 10/29/02

YOUNG DEFENDS HER ROLE: Opera Australia artistic director Simone Young says that contrary to reports, her planned season would not have put the company $10 million in debt. Also that the company’s board misunderstood her artistic role and expected her to also operate as a manager. In September Young was told that her contract would not be renewed. Sydney Morning Herald 10/30/02

MUSIC COMPANIES COULD ALIENATE CONSUMERS: A new survey suggests that consumers will feel alienated by copy-protecting measures by recording companies if CDs don’t play on any player they own. The survey says that “the majority of music buyers questioned believed they should have the right to make copies of CDs they have bought, either as back up or for family and friends.” BBC 10/29/02

Tuesday October 29

THE DEATH OF THE AUDIO CASSETTE: The audio cassette is for all intents dead. “The end, on some strange and intellectually picky level, of the crucial dialectic between Side A and Side B, and the idea that songs talk to one another and take you someplace. Is the death of the cassette as sweetly sad as the death, years ago, of the vinyl record? No, the professor sighs. Well, maybe yes. ‘It’s a mixed romance’… Washington Post 10/29/02

THE PROBLEM WITH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRAS: Symphony orchestras across America are struggling with money (or rather, a lack of it). “What’s the problem with classical music? As it turns out, all unhappy symphony orchestras are unhappy in their own way, but the answer is surprisingly consistent. “It really is ‘the economy, stupid.’ It’s affecting all those revenue sources – especially corporate, foundation, government and individual donations – that are crucial to an orchestra’s bottom line.” Los Angeles Times 10/29/02

Monday October 28

OLDER STARS ABANDON RADIO: Noticed that older musicians seem to be showing up on the tube more often? “Television – and not just MTV – has supplanted radio as the chief means of exposing new music, particularly for veteran artists. Shrinking radio playlists have less room for new music. Far more radio stations are likely to play James Taylor’s Fire and Rain, for example, than take a chance on his new single.” Nando Times 10/27/02

PLOT PROBLEM: Why are opera stories often so ridiculous? When one thinks of all the effort that goes into composing and producing an opera, it seems odd that plots are often so ludicrous. But many are classic stories, and “some stories grow over centuries – each new generation’s projections and alterations ripening them until, eventually, they become mythic. With each successful retread, a story will gain in resonance and meaning – reinforcing its power to move and inform us.” The Guardian (UK) 10/28/02

PLANS FOR COPENHAGEN’S OPERA HOUSE IN DISPUTE: Plans for Copenhagen’s new Opera House were unveiled last week, but Henning Larsen, the project’s architect, wasn’t present for the event after apparent disagreements with the owner about what the project would look like. “It’s an embarrassing situation at the moment, and it would be sad for Copenhagen if Henning Larsen resigned from the opera house project. I can’t even bear the thought. It would be like the Sydney Opera House all over again.” Copenhagen Post 10/25/02

Sunday October 27

THE MODERN ORCHESTRA MODEL: With orchestras collapsing and gasping for breath all across the continent, the San Francisco Symphony is firmly in the black, artistically sound, and universally acknowledged to be one of the most musically daring ensembles in the world. Is it the ultra-trendy city? The dynamic and flashy music director? Don’t fool yourself: the SFS is where it is due to prescient long-range planning, an unswerving commitment to its audience, and a top-notch management team which foresaw the economic collapse five years before it happened, and had a ‘Plan B’ ready to roll. Dallas Morning News 10/27/02

ARTEMIS STYMIED AT THE BORDER: The Artemis Quartet has been forced to cancel a U.S. tour after cellist Eckart Runge’s visa was held up by U.S. authorities. What would cause such governmental concern over a respected musician from a friendly European country? It seems that, 11 years ago, while a student at the Aspen Music Festival, Runge stole a 99-cent pair of tweezers from a pharmacy, which was enough to trigger a lengthy background check. The New York Times 10/26/02

NEW HOPE IN COWBOY CITY: Hold that funeral procession! The Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra may yet have life, after a prominent real estate company announced plans to help the ensemble sell 700 ‘voucher packages’ to its corporate clients at $500 apiece. The company’s CEO is confident the plan will work, and hopes that other Calgary business heavyweights will follow suit with similar innovative programs, saying “My salesmen can lease and sell office buildings and shopping centres, so we think we can sell symphony tickets, too. The old form of fundraising — walking around and looking for money — doesn’t work anymore.” Calgary Herald 10/26/02

THE NEW WAVE: “Every half century, history rolls at us another wave of composers who will change the way music is heard and played. At the beginning of the 20th century came Debussy and Schoenberg, soon joined by Bartok and Stravinsky. In the 1950’s, those arriving ranged from John Cage to Milton Babbitt. Now it is time for another great sweep, perhaps going in even more diverse directions and prompted from farther out on the periphery. The 20th century’s revolutions were led from Europe and then the United States; now may come the turn of China, Australia and Latin America.” Exhibit A may be Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov. The New York Times 10/27/02

  • IS NEW MUSIC FINALLY POPULAR? Ever since the modernist and serialist movements of the mid-20th century, conventional wisdom has held that the concertgoing public cannot abide new music, and that any effort to program modern works must be counterbalanced with a healthy dose of ‘safe’ classics. But with the rise of accessible (and yet unquestionably serious) composers like John Corigliano, how can anyone still claim that new music is unpopular? Philadelphia Inquirer 10/27/02

REASSESSING WAGNER, AGAIN: Richard Wagner is perhaps the most bitterly debated composer in all of Western classical music. With historians constantly reassessing his role in the development of opera and the effect (or lack thereof) of his own vicious anti-Semitism on his work, the music itself can easily be lost in the shuffle. With London’s Barbican Centre rolling out a new Ring cycle this fall, concertgoers have a chance to experience the composer from all sides of the historical debate. The Observer (UK) 10/27/02

WELCOME (BACK) TO HONG KONG: “In August of 2000, some 10,000 classical music fans in Hong Kong paid US$30 each to hear Russia’s famous orchestra play a series of concerts. By most all accounts the evening was a success, with one local critic lauding the orchestra’s ‘exciting accelerandos and heart-stopping rubatos.’ The only problem was that the real Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra was touring France, Spain and Portugal at the time. A group of apparently cash-strapped musical imposters duped Hong Kong’s music aficionados.” This week, the real Moscow Phil makes its triumphant premiere/return to Taipei. Taipei Times 10/25/02

Friday October 25

ON-AIR WOMEN: Women artists have always had a tough time getting airplay on American radio stations. Until very recently, most stations had a rule of not playing back-to-back songs by women. Now 12 of the Billboard Top 20 songs are by women artists. But while it’s better, critics still claim bias. “It’s indicative of the industry that programmers don’t think that men, and especially boys, are interested in hearing what women have to say unless it’s a sexy song.” Christian Science Monitor 10/25/02

JUNKIFICATION OF THE CLASSICAL CHARTS: Simon Rattle’s new recording of Mahler’s 5th Symphony with the Berlin Symphony recently topped the Classical charts. It was the first time in a decade that a symphony held the No. 1 spot. Why so rare? Over the years the classical charts have been junked up with music that can hardly be classified as classical. “Over a dozen years, as sales slumped, the classical record industry dumped the serious stuff and embraced dubious surrogates.” La Scena Musicale 10/23/02

HOW TO STAGE AN OPERA IN 36 HOURS: The saga leading up to the Kirov Opera’s appearance in Los Angeles this week has been, well, operatic – cancellation of the originally scheduled opera, sets that floated away to Asia in a dockworkers’ strike… This week the company itself showed up in LA. “The full dress rehearsal is scheduled for 7 p.m. and for the half hour leading up to it, it is difficult to imagine that somewhere within this building there is a 280-member opera company. The halls are silent, backstage is silent, the makeup people sit outside the silent wardrobe rooms, waiting, not really knowing what is going to happen next…” Los Angeles Times 10/25/02

  • KIROV REVIEW: “With the raising of the curtain, it was as though the black cloud that had hung over the first Kirov Opera L.A. tour finally seemed to lift. The Kirov company is large and full of life. The chorus is exceptional. And on Wednesday there was plenty of individuality in the performances.” Los Angeles Times 10/25/02

WHY DOWNLOADING MAKES GOOD BUSINESS SENSE: Recording artist Janis Ian says that recording companies are wrong about downloading piracy. “Attacking your own customers because they want to learn more about your products is a bizarre business strategy, one the music industry cannot afford to continue. On the first day I posted downloadable music, my merchandise sales tripled, and they have stayed that way ever since. I’m not about to become a zillionaire as a result, but I am making more money. At a time when radio playlists are tighter and any kind of exposure is hard to come by, 365,000 copies of my work now will be heard. Even if only 3% of those people come to concerts or buy my CDs, I’ve gained about 10,000 new fans this year.” USAToday 10/24/02

  • BURN BABY BURN: Music fans worldwide are downloading music files and burning their own copies at an increasing pace. Traditional recording companies looking to stop the practice are getting increasingly aggressive. To fight illicit copying, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has set up a worldwide anti-piracy network, which has issued more than 10,000 prosecutions this year.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/25/02

HOUSE BAND: “House concerts are exactly what those two words say – concerts that people hold in their houses – and they’ve become something of a nationwide phenomenon during the past 10 years. While there has always been live music in homes – classical drawing room salons, rural front-porch hoedowns, Harlem rent parties, rock bands in basements – the current style of house party has flourished because of a confluence of circumstances, the primary one being the graying of the baby boomers…” Washington Post 10/25/02

Thursday October 24

HARD TIMES AT PRODIGY CENTRAL: You know the music industry has hit hard times when the president of the Juilliard School is saying things like “I’m just as much thrilled if someone gets a job teaching junior high school music as if they get a job in the Chicago Symphony.” Joseph Polisi also indicated that, with the job market in music tighter than ever, it will be essential for young musicians to find new ways of bringing music to the public if the form is to survive. Star Tribune (Minneapolis/St. Paul) 10/23/02

A NEW TAKE ON PIANO CONCERTS: A concert promoter brings his pop model to the classical piano recital. He’s pairing big stars with young “opening acts,” setting low ticket prices, performing in unusual spaces, and advertising in non-traditional (for the classical world) ways. The New York Times 10/24/02

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ORCHESTRA BOOM? Only five years ago, many North American orchestras were convinced that the future was bright. New concert halls abounded, and ticket sales were up continent-wide. These days, though, it is a rare orchestra which isn’t struggling in the grip of crippling deficits, and many smaller orchestras are finding themselves on the precipice. Case in point: the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. Edmonton Journal 10/24/02

TRYING SOMETHING NEW: “Taking a small but noticeable step away from the programming habits of the city’s former orchestra, Symphony San Jose Silicon Valley on Wednesday announced its first four-concert season. Six of the 14 scheduled works are by U.S.-born composers, and there’s at least one American work on every program.” The orchestra was recently created by the San Jose Ballet to fill the void left by the demise of the San Jose Symphony. San Jose Mercury News 10/24/02

COPYRIGHT HYSTERIA: “People auction everything from stereo equipment to World Series tickets to used software on eBay. Why, then, did an indie musician who tried to hawk his own band’s CD get fingered by the site as a copyright violator?” Wired 10/24/02

LEARNING LATIN: Latin jazz has been around for decades, but it’s never had a full chair at the official jazz table. “Now several long-flowing streams of interest in Latin jazz are running together, and it seems that the form is becoming recognized as official culture in America, ready for heritage-building, specialized analysis and education.” The New York Times 10/24/02

SHORTLISTED FOR TALENT, NOT SALES: The popular music industry long ago sunk into a mire of marketing gimmickry which has had the effect of shutting the door on countless talented artists who somehow didn’t fit the profile of today’s navel-baring, assembly-line pop stars. The Shortlist Music Prize aims to swing the balance back towards talent and originality, and that mission is visible in this year’s shortlist, on which the most recognizable name belongs to Icelandic art-rock purveyor Björk. The Globe & Mail (AP) 10/24/02

Wednesday October 23

CHICAGO SYMPHONY DEFICIT: The Chicago Symphony reports a $6.1 million deficit for last season. The orchestra notes “challenging economic conditions,” and says that “even record-breaking contributions to the annual fund could not close the ‘widening imbalance’ between operating revenues and expenses.” Chicago Sun-Times 10/23/02

CANADA’S THRIVING CLASSICAL MUSIC RADIO: While classical music radio has been dying out in the United States in the past decade, “in Canada, looking over the last 20 years, there has been an obvious growth in the appetite for classical programming, as well as jazz, on FM radio.” La Scena Musicale 10/22/02

Tuesday October 22

CHICAGO LOSSES: The Chicago Symphony will announce a season deficit of at least $4 million this evening. “This is uncharacteristically bad news for an orchestra that has been happily in the black for 14 of the past 17 seasons. It also marks the CSO’s second consecutive annual deficit, following a $1.3 million dip into red ink on last year’s budget of $59 million.” Chicago Lyric Opera is also facing a downturn. To cut costs, both have dropped long-running radio broadcasts. Chicago Sun-Times 10/22/02

SINGLE-MINDED: The single record is dead of course. And yet, there have been heavy sales of a few recordings released as singles in the past year. Some believe the format should be revived. “We have been in a song-driven marketplace for a number of years, and yet the availability of singles continues to decline. When there is no way for the consumer to purchase just the one song they want, why are we all surprised that they take advantage of the widely available alternative – which is a free copy from one of the various file-sharing services?” Baltimore Sun 10/22/02

IN PRAISE OF M&M: “The worst thing about the record industry’s current infatuation with gorgeous violinists who don’t actually play the violin very well is that it steals the limelight from gorgeous violinists who do. Two of the best Midori and Viktoria Mullova – deserve attention right now.” The Times (UK) 10/22/02

COMMITMENT TO NEW MUSIC, WYOMING STYLE: The Cheyenne [Wyoming] Symphony is a long way from a major city. But the orchestra decided to present a program of music by composer John Corigliano. The orchestra invited Corigliano to town for three days, found underwriting and sponsorships, and sold out the city’s 1,500-seat civic center. “The concert was greeted with cheers, whistles and cascades of applause. Quite simply, it was a success in every way.” Denver Post 10/22/02

Monday October 21

NJ SYMPHONY RUNS DEFICIT: The New Jersey Symphony ran up a deficit of $1.1 million last season. Alarmingly, the figure is about 7 percent of the orchestra’s total budget. “The economy has basically moved orchestras from experiencing small surpluses to experiencing small deficits. I anticipate it’s a short-term phenomenon.” Newark Star-Ledger 10/18/02

OPERA IN L.A. – MISSED OPPORTUNITIES? A few years ago opera was a hot ticket in Los Angeles, particularly among the under-30 crowd. Now? “Did opera turn out to be another pop-cult fad, or did the L.A. company blow the opportunity to capture this most sought-after demographic?” Los Angeles Times 10/17/02

CALGARY PHIL DEMANDS LEADER’S HEAD: The Calgary Philharmonic, which suspended operations last week after a financial crisis, has asked for the resignation of its president. The orchestra’s future is in doubt. “The CPO’s recent aggressive marketing campaign to secure 2,000 new subscriber households by the end of October has only managed to gain about 800 new patrons.” Calgary Herald 10/19/02

  • JUST SHUT IT DOWN: “The fact is that big orchestras are done for. Gonzo. They’re an anachronism, an all-but-dead corpse kept on life support by tax dollars and an ever dwindling group of philanthropists and ticket buyers.” Just shut them down. Calgary Herald 10/18/02

KNOWING WHEN TO QUIT: “Performing is a physical activity, and time takes its toll on the human body: on breath support, on lips, on strength, on coordination, on sight and hearing. Like athletes, singers and instrumentalists eventually have to come to terms with the fact that they can’t do certain things as well at 60 or 70 as they did at 20 or 30. It’s easy to stay too long, and those who do risk undermining their legacies.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch 10/20/02

KEITH JARRETT’S NEW STYLE: Pianist Keith Jarrett became ill six years ago, and during the long rehabilitation when he didn’t play, Jarrett re-evaluated his art. “I didn’t like a lot of my long introductions, and there were lots of things I wasn’t happy with about my touch. My illness gave me an opportunity that very few musicians have, to re-evaluate everything. I wanted to reconnect to the idea of sounding like a horn — a trumpet or saxophone.” The Times (UK) 10/21/02

Sunday October 20

CHANGE AT THE TOP: Many of the world’s top orchestras are introducing new music directors. “All this giddy change is partly coincidence; music directors come, and they go. But a new century also generates a new zeitgeist, and that surely motivates managements, some of which have gently or not-so-gently eased out aging, long-standing conductors. And these are turbulent times for classical music institutions.” The question is – what does all this change mean? Los Angeles Times 10/20/02

OLD AND NEW – TOGETHER AGAIN: Wolfgang Sawallisch is conducting his last season as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Christoph Eschenbach takes on the job next year. This week though, they both appeared on the same stage in performance. “The program had the aura of history, with music director Sawallisch escorting Eschenbach, here as piano soloist, out on stage. You could see [Eschenbach], between piano passages, surveying his future players, taking inventory.” Philadelphia Inquirer 10/20/02

UNCOMMON CHANCES: The group Ethel is a string quartet. They play contemporary music. Often in places you don’t usually find string quartets. But don’t call Ethel a string quartet. It’s a band. “What image does a string quartet put in your head? A dour group of people playing perfectly together in perfect harmony. That’s not the path that I wanted to go down.” The New York Times 10/20/02

RUNNING ON ABOUT RENEE: Renee Fleming is the diva of the moment. She’s a breakout artist who’s fame surpasses the concert hall. “One measure of her special hold on the American public is the constant stream of feature articles that have brought her personal history into the household of anyone who watches television or subscribes to magazines. Her girl-next-door upbringing. Her initial uncertainties in finding her direction as a classical musician. Her seemingly picture-perfect marriage.. The New York Times 10/20/02

CLASSIC CONFLICTS: More musicians are also showing up as critics in Philadelphia’s music scene. Is this healthy? “It’s the classic journalism-school question. How do you stay neutral as a reporter when the best way to cover a certain community is to be part of it? You can’t easily reconcile these things.” Philadelphia Inquirer 10/20/02

Friday October 18

ROCKED THE VOTE: “The music industry’s engagement with politics has always ebbed and flowed. In the 1960s, when rock was part of a counter-culture, protest songs were both credible and glamorous. In the punk era, the Top 10 included a string of polemical singles by the Jam, the Clash and the Specials. Since then, thrilling music and political engagement have rarely coincided.” The Guardian (UK) 10/18/02

JANSONS GETS CONCERTGEBOUW: The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam has named Mariss Jansons as its new chief conductor beginning with the 2004–2005 season. The only other serious contender for the post was Christian Thielemann. Andante 10/17/02

BAZ’S BOHEME: Baz Luhrmann took two years and 3000 auditions to cast his La Boheme. It’s currently playing previews in San Francisco before moving to Broadway. Visually, it’s unconventional – teeming with “energy and characteristic Luhrmann colour. Luhrmann says his goal was to reinvent opera for a new generation; to bring it from its lofty level to mass audiences, in the way Puccini’s art was enjoyed. The opera is sung in Italian, but with English surtitles that include such Batman-era translations as Kapow!, Thwack!and @#!&% for a mock fight scene.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/18/02

Thursday October 17

BAD DAY (CAREER?): Composer John Corigliano has had a successful career in music. But he’s discouraged about his profression. “I’m so discouraged I just don’t even feel like writing in classical music or concert music, because I truly feel that we’re in a terrible state. The (classical) record industry has collapsed. No one’s interested. No one cares. Can you imagine anybody having a riot like The Rite of Spring now over any piece of art or music? Do you think they care? No one does.” Denver Post 10/17/02

LA OPERA’S EMERGENCY SETS: When the ship carrying sets and costumes for Los Angeles Opera’s production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was unable to unload its cargo during the recent dock strike, the ship turned around and headed for Tokyo, triggering a “dramatic turn of events. Los Angeles Opera officials learned there was no way to get the sets back to California in time for opening night and decided to build the sets themselves – using a 30-pound roll of blueprints flown from Russia.” Nando Times (AP) 10/16/02

CAN THE ENGLISH NATIONAL OPERA SURVIVE? “The case for keeping an English national opera has been weakened by a decade of weak administration and mounting debt. The deficit, I’m reliably informed, has topped £3 million. There is no cash in the kitty for new productions and the box-office is slow. These are bleak days at the Coliseum. Even the neon roof-sign is perpetually on the blink. So why keep ENO going? Because it’s the only place this side of Paris where you can see professional opera for a fair price.” La Scena Musicale 10/16/02

EARLY WORD ON BAZ’S BOHEME: One of the most-awaited productions on Broadway this season is Baz Lurhmann’s interpretation of La Boheme. How will the director work his offbeat magic on one of the most familiar operas in the repertory? Lurhmann’s Boheme has just opened in San Francisco for an out-of-town tryout. “What theatergoers get here, from celebrated Australian film and stage director Baz Luhrmann, is an intimately scaled, emotionally attentive, visually choice and musically lucid staging of a great opera about riotous love and bohemian bonhomie.” San Francisco Chronicle 10/17/02

  • EXPERIMENTS IN OPERA: Steve Reich’s new “video opera” opens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week. “Fat ladies won’t ever sing in this one. A chamber ensemble sits below a screen on which video images unfold depicting three seminal events in 20th-century history.” The question is: “Can it create an entrancing alternate universe that operagoers can enter and enjoy?” Philadelphia Inquirer 10/17/02

Wednesday October 16

ANOTHER ORCHESTRA GOES OUT OF BUSINESS: The troubled Calgary Philharmonic has suspended operations and filed a brief with a bankruptcy court, cancelling all concerts for at least the next 45 days and laying off 65 musicians and as many as 20 staff. Calgary’s arts scene, never exactly a bustling one, is expected to suffer fallout from the CPO’s slow and very public collapse over the last year or two, and many in the CPO organization seem surprised and disgusted that the city’s wealthy residents didn’t seem to do a lot to help when the chips were down. Calgary Herald 10/16/02

MUSICAL BIAS: The Missouri Supreme Court is considering whether to overturn the death sentence of a man who claims his jury was unfairly influenced when the prosecution played a violent rap song by Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony during summation. At issue is not only the relevance of the music to the murders the defendant was charged with, but the very real possibility that prosecutors intended to play to jurors’ racist tendencies. “If killing two people isn’t quite enough, do you think just maybe the sound of disgusting rap music might play to any unknown racial bias lurking within one or two jurors? If Mo’ Murdah helps get a man the death penalty, would a nice white lady singing God Bless America have spared him?” St. Louis Post-Dispatch 10/16/02

Tuesday October 15

CHINA PHIL EXEC ARRESTED FOR CORRUPTION: Just hours before his orchestra was to open the Beijing Music festival, the deputy executive director of the China Philharmonic Orchestra was detained by police at his Beijing home on charges of corruption. “Evidence against Zhao included 10 million yuan (US$1.2 million) in cash found at his residence and six deluxe vehicles registered under his and his wife’s names, the total cost of which exceeded the couple’s present salaries by a large margin.” Andante 10/14/02

LEARNING ON THE JOB? Twenty-four-year-old Katharina Wagner, granddaughter of composer Richard Wagner, has been named by her father to succeed him running the Bayreuth festival. But in her first outing as an opera director, she’s created a controversial production. “Storms of boos, alternating with bravos, buffeted the production team at the premiere. ‘The reactions were very violent,’ Ms. Wagner said. ‘One woman said to me, `I know how Richard Wagner meant it.’ That would be a real sensation if she really did’.” The New York Times 10/15/02

YOUNG AT HEART: Two weeks ago Simone Young was fired as general director of Opera Australia. But not right away; she’ll stay on running the company until her contract is up next year. Isn’t it awkward working for the people who just fired you? Sure. But in the meantime there are operas to be produced, audiences to be made happy… The Age (Melbourne) 10/15/02

Monday October 14

BRITAIN’S FAVORITE OPERA: It’s Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, as voted in a Classic FM poll. “Wagner — whose work was almost exclusively operatic — is the most notable absentee, with no entries in the list which features just four composers.” Andante (PA) 11/012/02

COSTLY ADVENTURE: Franz Xaver Ohnesorg’s abrupt resignation as manager of the Berlin Philharmonic ended a costly adventure. Ohnesorg’s big salary must still be paid through 2006, and he exposed the orchestra to a lawsuit it is likely to lose. “This is a waste of money Berlin style, and it is the clear result of a cultural policy that has its eyes more on names and insider relationships than on concepts or programs.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10/11/02

SERIOUSLY OPERATIC POLITICS: The brief yet fierce succession crisis which enveloped Florence’s famed opera house Teatro del Maggio Musicale (formally Teatro Communale) this past month was worthy of an opera itself. The behind-the-scenes battle had all the elements of a classic operatic story: melodramatic plot twists, massive egos, a dangerous emperor (Italian P.M. Silvio Berlusconi – who says right-wingers don’t care about the arts?), a loyal but ultimately betrayed servant of the benevolent and aged head of the household, and the eventual gathering together of the working class people of the community to force a happy ending. But don’t expect these performers to be joining hands and taking a bow anytime soon. Andante 10/14/02

SAVE OUR SHEET MUSIC: “Unimpressed with the San Jose Symphony’s efforts to save its music library, the musicians have taken fundraising into their own hands. The musicians have raised more than $20,000 to preserve the sheet music, which is valued at about $125,000. The library consists of more than 1,000 marked-on scores that could be lost when the symphony declares bankruptcy in coming weeks.” The SJS ceased operations earlier this year, but a new orchestra being started by the city’s ballet troupe might be able to make use of such an extensive library. San Jose Mercury News 10/14/02

GETTING PROACTIVE WITH THE KIDS: Ask a musician about the problem of aging and dwindling audiences for classical music, and you’ll likely get an answer along the lines of “There’s really nothing we can do. They just don’t teach music in the schools the way they used to.” The Cleveland Chamber Music Society agrees with the latter statement, and is determined to do something about it. The CCMS is sponsoring a new program to bring live music performed by top artists into Cleveland’s schools, and creating an endowment to ensure that music education will not wither on the vine. The Plain Dealer 10/14/02

MUSICAL GAMES: Composer Sam Hayden has written an interactive piece of music for the internet that combines composition with video games. “3D Music extends to the Internet several important concepts in contemporary composition. For instance, it experiments with spatialized sounds, so that a listener hears different music in different locations. Surrendering control of the work’s structure to individual online visitors challenges the notion of a classical composition as a fixed entity. Letting audience members determine ‘how a piece of music sounds — to a large degree, not to a cosmetic degree — is clearly something very new and radical’.” The New York Times 10/14/02

PLAYING ALONG: When talking movies first hit theatre screens, 55,000 musicians in the US who had accompanied the silents were thrown out of work within six months. “But some musicians still make a healthy living playing along to old movies at festivals around the world.” BBC 10/14/02

COVENT GARDEN’S NEW MAN: Anthony Pappano is Covent Garden’s new music director. It’s a big and controversial position, the kind of job you have to grow into. But Pappano has confidence. “I think the house feels a new energy because I am always here and going to rehearsals and sort of going at 100 miles per hour all the time. And this opera house has needed that kind of investment.” The New York Times 10/14/02

THE TRUTH ABOUT MARIA: A doctor who treated Maria Callas for dermatomyositis, a degenerative tissue disease, is speaking out about the famed soprano’s illness more than 25 years after her death because, he says, he has been incensed by ongoing portrayals of Callas as a disturbed prima donna who retired from the stage as a result of mental instabilities. The doctor further asserts that the diva’s death in 1977 came not as a result of heartbreak (her husband abandoned her to marry Jacqueline Kennedy) but from a heart attack brought on by her disease. Andante (AP) 10/14/02

Sunday October 13

BEVERLY’S BACK: Was it really only six months ago that Beverly Sills resigned her post at the head of New York’s Lincoln Center, following a contentious debate over the complex’s impending expansion and renovation? At the time, Sills said that she was retiring, and wanted to “smell the flowers a little bit.” But apparently the quiet life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be for Sills, 73, who has just accepted the chairmanship of the Metropolitan Opera. The Met is, of course, Lincoln Center’s most powerful tenant, putting Sills smack in the middle of the same debates she so recently bowed out of. The New York Times 10/12/02

FREE CDs FOR IMMUNITY: “In New York last week the Big Five record companies struck a deal with the attorneys-general of 40 US states who were suing them for price-fixing. The Five agreed to give five and a half million free CDs to schools and public libraries after being accused of setting mimimum CD prices at three major retailers… Anomalies like these have provoked parliamentary inquiries in Washington, London and Brussels, but never a full prosecution. Governments do not mess with the music biz. It is too big, too generous at election time and too influential on young minds for politicians to risk a coalition of gangsta rappers, country crooners and opera divas converging on their doorstep in cacophonous protest. The biz has always got away with it in the lobby. Now, the US prosecutors have backed off again in exchange for a stack of free discs.” La Scena Musicale 10/10/02

GREED KILLED THE RADIO STAR: With the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Lyric Opera both killing off their local and national radio broadcasts, the Second City’s classical music community is in danger of losing cultural cache and national recognition. Critic John van Rhein, who this weekend celebrates 25 years of observing the Chicago music scene, is disgusted by the lack of vision from all sides. “The classical music world is reaping the bitter fruits of American orchestras having priced themselves out of the broadcast and recordings market. The free-spending ’90s are dead — musicians in other cities have swallowed hard and accepted it. Chicago has yet to do so.” Chicago Tribune 10/13/02

NOTHING HAPPENS BY ACCIDENT: To hear many people tell it, you would think that the recent resurgence of opera as a popular art form has happened purely by chance, and that the increasingly young age of opera patrons is due to nothing more than youngsters wandering into the opera house by accident. Not so: in fact, opera companies across North America have been making a concerted effort to draw in a more diverse crowd. The Canadian Opera Company is a prime example, with an ‘Opera 101’ education program, as well as a continuing series of classic operas directed by famous names like Atom Egoyan. Toronto Star 10/12/02

KNOWING WHAT’S IMPORTANT: As deficits mount and cost-cutting measures spring up at orchestras across North America, one of the hardest expenses to justify is the international tour. Short-sighted board members often question whether touring is an investment with no return, and the orchestra’s regular patrons hardly notice whether their band tours or not. Besides that, touring is horribly expensive. Yet some orchestras seem to retain an unshakable commitment to it, and one example you might not expect is Baltimore. In the wake of 9/11, as other orchestras were cancelling international travel in a panic, Baltimore went to Europe without hesitation. Now, the BSO has just wrapped up a sucessful Japan tour, and continues to make inroads on the international scene. Baltimore Sun 10/13/02

FORGOT ABOUT THE BOTTOM LINE: No word yet on the acoustic success of the newly renovated Orchestra Hall in Detroit (only a pops concert has been played at the refurbished hall so far) but patrons already have found one serious flaw. It seems the hall refurbished the audience chairs in order to bring them up to fire codes, and installed new cushions as well as the legally mandated ‘weight bars’ on the back edge of each seat. The problem is, the cushions don’t cover the bars, and many patrons came away from the performance with sore hind quarters as a result. The orchestra says that fewer than half the seats are affected, and they are offering extra cushions to any patron that wants one. Detroit News 10/12/02

FILLING DUTOIT’S SHOES: The Montreal Symphony Orchestra is one of the world’s finest ensembles, with or without departed music director Charles Dutoit. But when an orchestra loses a leader of Dutoit’s stature, regardless of how the musicians may have felt about him, no one can deny the importance of choosing a successor carefully. This is not to say that the next Montreal stickman needs to have Dutoit’s international reputation or global experience, only that the conductor chosen must be someone willing and able to grow with the orchestra, to lead them into a new era without relinquishing a grip on the last 25 years of unquestionable success. Toronto Star 10/12/02

MUSIC AMID THE MUDDLE: This week, Shanghai launched an incredibly ambitious international music festival, and predicted that the huge gathering would ‘make history.’ The reality, says one critic, was that the city and the festival organizers were completely unprepared to put on a show of such magnitude. “The level of incompetence is hard to understand in a city that resembles a bizarre cross between the sci-fi optimism of Dan Dare and the dystopian nightmare of Blade Runner… How many Chinese men does it take to change a light bulb? Eight. This is not a joke. I happen to know the answer because I watched it happen. China is a country whose full employment policy creates ludicrous levels of over-staffing and a pass-the-buck culture.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/12/02

FAME CAN BE FLEETING: “Hey! You’ve won the prestigious Van Cliburn piano competition! What are you going to do now? Answer: Go to Bakersfield; Allendale, Michigan; Hot Springs Village, Arkansas… Life isn’t concertos at Carnegie Hall for Van Cliburn winners. After getting showered with attention and fame, finalists begin a two-year grind of recitals and mostly low-key orchestra dates. Even with all the hype, winning the Van Cliburn doesn’t guarantee stardom.” San Jose Mercury News 10/12/02

Friday October 11

SHORT-TERM RELIEF IN PITTSBURGH: The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which is running a 7-figure deficit and threatening bankruptcy if the community doesn’t step up its support, finally has a bit of good news to report. “Acusis, a technology and delivery service company with offices in Pittsburgh, has pledged $225,000 over a three-year period to the PSO.” Officials say they are grateful for the donation, but stress that they still require a greater ongoing commitment from Pittsburgh’s wealthy classes. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/11/02

L.A. OPERA’S PRODUCTION WOES: Los Angeles Opera is having a tough time getting its October opera together. First it canceled a $3-million Kirov production of War and Peace because of money problems. Now its replacement – another Kirov offering, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk – is in trouble. Because of the lockout of West Coast ports, the sets, costumes and props for the production couldn’t wait in LA’s harbour, and now they’ve departed “on a slow boat to Tokyo.” Los Angeles Times 10/10/02

SEATTLE OPERA HOUSE BAILOUT: In 1999, Seattle voters approved a levy providing nearly $30 million of city money towards the $128 million renovation of the Seattle Center Opera House, and were guaranteed that the city would not be responsible for any cost overruns or additional funding needs. But with the project nearly stalled over a gap between anticipated and received funding from King County and the state of Washington, Seattle’s mayor is proposing an additional $27.8 million “loan” to the Opera House. That’s money the city is unlikely to get back. Seattle Times 10/10/02

YEAH, AND NAPSTER CAUSED THE RECESSION, TOO: The global slump in CD sales is getting worse, with the latest figures showing a 9% drop in sales in the first half of 2002, following a 5% drop last year. It’s all the fault of internet piracy, according to the industry, with free song-swapping sites “the greatest threat facing the music industry today,” but the industry still hasn’t come up with anything approaching a user-friendly legal alternative to free sites like Kazaa and Gnutella. BBC 10/11/02

UNDERSTANDING PYOTR: Tchaikovsky’s music is much loved, but his work is widely regarded as sentimental and lightweight. Is it a bum rap? “The industry of speculation around Tchaikovsky has had an ambivalent effect on his artistic reputation. Tchaikovsky’s cachet is good for shifting CDs and concert tickets, but it leaves us with the impression that listening to Tchaikovsky is a pleasurable vice to be indulged rather than the kind of worthy artistic undertaking we associate with Mozart or Shakespeare.” The Guardian (UK) 10/11/02

ONE WAY TO PUT BUTTS IN THE SEATS: The Toronto Symphony Orchestra is taking a novel approach to filling the empty seats at Roy Thompson Hall. The TSO has teamed up with HurryDate, a local dating service, to provide prospective couples with a pair of free tickets to a concert, in the hope that some of them will return as paying customers. The gamble is just the most high-profile in a series of audience-building maneuvers by the TSO: others include a “Soundcheck” program designed to draw in young people, and a cocnerted effort to interest the city’s immigrant communities in classical music. Toronto Star 10/09/02

AUSTIN OPERA FIRES DIRECTOR: Last week Austin Lyric Opera fired its general director Joseph McClain. “Budget deficits and advocacy of new operas had created friction between McClain and factions on the board for at least two years. The dismissal was predicated on recent projections that the company would face more deficits for the next three years.” Austin American-Statesman 10/10/02

NATURALLY, IT WAS A COLLEGE STUDENT: The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra says it has solved the mystery of how pornographic phrases got into an internet database, and by extension, onto the computers of their subscribers when they attempted to listen to a promotional CD sent out free of charge by the NZSO. A college student playing the CD in his girlfriend’s computer was prompted by the database to enter titles for the tracks, and he did so, believing his graphically descriptive phrases were only being saved to one computer. Upon hearing what he had inadvertently done, the student turned himself in to police. No charges will be filed. Wired 10/11/02

Thursday October 10

DON’T PUNISH OPERA COMPANY OUSTED DIRECTOR SAYS: Simone Young, who was told a few weeks ago her contract as director of Opera Australia was not being renewed, returned to Sydney Monday night, and got a standing ovation from the audience when she walked into the hall. She urged opera supporters not to cancel their subscriptions in protest of her firing. “If people want to support me, then the best thing they can do is make sure my performances are full, that all our performances are full.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/10/02

WAGNER TO TAKE OVER WEIMAR: Nike Wagner, granddaughter of Richard Wagner, has been chosen as director of the Weimar Music Festival for at least three seasons. “Ms Wagner, a former culture minister in the Hamburg regional government, was also considered in 1999 to take over the Bayreuth festival, which showcases her great-grandfather’s works.” BBC 10/09/02

GOOD AS NEW: The Detroit Symphony Orchestra returns to its home hall this week following a $60 million renovation project which promises to make the venue a viable home for many years to come. Unlike other recent renovations to concert halls, this upgrade was mainly cosmetic, rather than acoustical, although part of the budget went to the building of a new 4-story annex with a 550-seat theater and musicians’ lounge. In a bittersweet concession to the way American orchestras are run these days, the first performance at the rejuvenated hall will be a ‘pops’ concert this weekend. Detroit News 10/10/02

WHAT, US, WORRY? “In a difficult financial environment for symphony orchestras, the Florida Orchestra has bucked a trend. In the fiscal year that closed at the end of June, the orchestra reported a surplus of $480,000 in a cash budget of $7.8-million at its annual meeting Tuesday. The Florida Orchestra didn’t have the weakened ticket sales that many other orchestras did after the terrorist attacks of last Sept. 11,” and a pre-9/11 round of budget cutting may have helped the orchestra stay above the red line. St. Petersburg Times 10/09/02

OH, GOD, NO: “A Russian opera company is planning a comic opera that will tell the infamous story of Monica Lewinsky and the president. The Russian president, to be precise. The composer of Monica in the Kremlin is Vitali Okorokov, a classically trained musician who is well known to the Russian public for his pop hits. After a performance of one of his symphonic poems, Okorokoc was approached by the artistic director of the Saratov Opera, who asked him to write an opera on a contemporary subject.” Andante 10/10/02

Wednesday October 9

AMERICAN MUSIC ONLINE: One of the biggest frustrations for composers is getting their music out to be heard. The American Music Center proposes some help – a new website that will make available access to the work of American composers. “New Music Jukebox offers a 24-hour ‘virtual’ listening room with streaming and downloadable sound files, as well as extensive composer biographies, works lists, publishers, performance data and other information, all cross-referenced.” The New York Times 10/09/02

AND OFFLINE… It had to start happening, given the grinding economics. Citing costs, lack of revenues, and uncertainty over royalty rates for music streamed over the internet, Chicago classical music station WFMT has decided to drop its internet streaming. Chicago Sun-Times 10/08/02

OPERA WARS: British arts policy tries to promote opera in parts of the country where there isn’t much. So regional companies get big subsidies. But bad facilities and lame programming choices undercut efforts. And knockoff foreign touring companies are an even bigger threat. “Audiences, depressingly, seem content to hear foreigners singing familiar tunes loudly, with scenery and costumes left over from the silent-film era.” The Telegraph (UK) 10/09/02

OHNESORG JUMPS FROM ANOTHER JOB: Franz Xaver Ohnesorg’s early departure as manager of the Berlin Philharmonic is officially for “personal reasons.” But “it was common knowledge that Ohnesorg, who left his previous post as executive director of Carnegie Hall suddenly and prematurely following two turbulent years, had provoked the ire of many in the course of his year in Berlin.” Andante 10/09/02

Tuesday October 8

X-RATED CLASSICAL: The New Zealand Symphony sent out 8000 promotional CDs to market its new season. But when recipients of the discs put them into computers to play, they discovered that someone had substituted the track titles with pornographic descriptions of sex acts. “It seemed the person responsible used an Internet media player to read the CD, made the changes and saved them on the database. This meant that whenever anyone else used a media player connected to that database, the X-rated version was displayed.” The Age (Melbourne) 10/08/02

FIGHTING OVER BEETHOVEN’S PIANO: Two Austrian museums are fighting over a piano that once belonged to Beethoven. The piano – built in 1803, and owned by the composer until 1824 – has “for the past 15 years been in the exhibition of musical instruments at the Palace Museum of the City of Linz. But for most of that time, the Vienna Museum of Art History has been trying to get it back.” Andante (DPA) 10/08/02

WHICH BEST IS BEST? The Donatella Flick Conducting Competition in London exists to spot new talented conductors and help them along. But by what criteria do you declare a winner? From a listener’s perspective, the wrong guy won… The Independent (UK) 10/07/02

ORANGE COUNTY DELAYS CONCERT HALL: The Orange County Performing Arts Center is pushing back the opening of its new $200 million concert hall by a year. But it’s not because fundraising has dried up, says the center’s management. “About $100 million has been raised or pledged since the campaign began nearly three years ago. But, amid a plummeting stock market and other economic woes, only $3.5 million in new donations has been announced in the last 12 months.” No, the reason is acoustical: “Because of its complex acoustical engineering, they said, the 2,000-seat hall requires a break-in time of three to six months to ‘tune’ it for peak sonic performance, and pushing to keep to the original schedule would have risked getting off to a bad start. ‘A lot of cities have looked at the Philadelphia experience and are making sure they have plenty of time for the tuning period’.” Los Angeles Times 10/08/02

Monday October 7

TOUGH SELL IN SOUTH FLORIDA: For 30 years orchestras have struggled in Miami trying to carve out an existence. And still, even with an ambitious new performing arts center rising, it’s a tough sell. “The Miami Philharmonic did some interesting things and remarkable playing in its time. But South Florida wasn’t ready to support an orchestra then – and I’m sorry to say I’m still not sure it’s ready to do it today. Besides that, the economy isn’t very good right now.” Miami Herald 10/06/02

WILL MONTREAL FANS STICK AROUND? Charles Dutoit’s explosive departure last season from the Montreal Symphony resulted in the high-profile cancellations of star soloists Mstislav Rostropovich and Yo-Yo Ma on this season’s schedule. The orchestra is watching anxiously to see if its fans will continue coming to concerts after the departure of the highly regarded conductor. After a good first week, the orchestra’s second week of concerts saw largely empty houses… Montreal Gazette 10/7/02

ACTIVE ANALYSIS: “To understand the significance of music for the musicians who created it and the society in which it was produced is a challenge to music-lovers. Perhaps no writer on music devoted more energy to this task than Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, and the translations into English of his writings on philosophy and music and their diffusion have been multiplying in recent years while, at the same time, his ideas have become widely influential in the US and Europe.” New York Review of Books 10/24/02

Sunday October 6

LATIN CAN’T FIND THE BEAT: This year’s Latin Grammys broadcast was a bomb in the ratings. Does this mean the end? “It would be a shame if this year’s poor ratings meant the end of the Latin Grammys. The awards have made a strong contribution to Latin music, acknowledging excellent artists we may never have heard of otherwise. Finally, Latin music was starting to get its due. But at this point in the Latin Grammys’ brief history, it’s time to either give up or get smart.” Los Angeles Times 10/06/02

HOUSTON SYMPHONY WANTS TO REDUCE PAY: Musicians of the Houston Symphony say they are being offered a dramatic pay cut that would reduce their base salary to $63,000 from $74,100. Reports have been circulating in the music community about proposed drastic cutbacks in pay that could lead to a strike. According to an administrator at one Houston arts organization, the offer includes several weeks of unpaid vacation and reduction of health benefits for dependents.” The orchestra recorded a $1.6 million deficit last season. Houston Chronicle 10/04/02

NEW SAN JOSE ORCHESTRA: With the defunct San Jose Symphony not likely to be revived any time soon, the the Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley has announced it’s staring its own orchestra and planning a season. The new orchestra will perform 7 concerts and expand the ballet’s orchestra of 45 players to 70 to 75. Many of those musicians also played in the San Jose Symphony. San Jose Mercury News 10/05/02

A HARD LOOK AT ORPHEUS AS IT TURNS 30: The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is 30 years old, and the musicianship of the conductorless band is often nothing short of breathtaking. But big challenges loom, and some of the orchestra’s claims are overblown. “Can Orpheus survive the turnover of personnel in the orchestra? Thirty years is an eternity for a string quartet but not that long for a symphony orchestra. We’re somewhere in between.” The New York Times 10/06/02

A NEW MODEL FOR RECORD DEALS: It does seem that EMI’s £80 million deal with Robbie Williams is just one more sign of recording company excess. But the deal may not be as outsized as it first appears. And it could change the way recording companies make deals with artists. “EMI will not only release Williams’s next six CDs, it also gets a cut of his lucrative merchandising, publishing, and touring rights. In effect, it becomes a multi-interest entertainment business rather than a mere record label. The result could be more control for artists, for long a sore point with stars of Williams’s stature, and greater financial security for labels.” The Guardian (UK) 10/05/02

  • BAD NEWS FOR CLASSICAL? Classical music lovers despair at the Williams deal. Experience shows that big spending on pop artists means less for classical releases. “EMI insists this is “nonsense”, and cites a balanced catalogue ranging from Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim, and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, to Nigel Kennedy and Vanessa Mae.” Still, ten years ago EMI released 100 classical recordings; last year there were 43. The Guardian (UK) 10/05/02

Friday October 4

CLEVELAND ORCH CUTS CHAMBER SERIES: Back when the epidemic of orchestra deficits began sweeping North America, many observers assumed that the crisis would be tough on the small and medium-sized orchestras, but would barely cause a ripple among the biggest and richest ensembles. It didn’t work out that way, and now, nearly every major American and Canadian orchestra is slashing and burning through the budget, looking for cost-saving measures. The latest victim is the Cleveland Orchestra’s chamber music series, which will be suspended as part of a cost-cutting package which also includes a staff wage freeze and pay cuts for the new music director and executive director. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 10/04/02

ZUKERMAN TO GET FIRST STERN AWARD: At the National Arts Awards in New York later this month, conductor and violinist Pinchas Zukerman will be the recipient of the first-ever Isaac Stern Award for Excellence in Classical Music. Zukerman, who has stirred up controversy in Canada in recent years with his comments about Canadian composers and “authentic” period performance, was one of Stern’s most beloved proteges, and often performed with him in Stern’s later years. Ottawa Citizen 10/04/02

ANOTHER THING WRONG WITH THE RECORDING INDUSTRY: After losing millions and having to buy out Mariah Carey from her recording contract, EMI has signed a deal with Robbie Williams worth by some estimates – £80 million. That’s the most lucrative contract ever for a British artist. Does EMI stand a chance of ever making its money back on the deal? Not likely… The Telegraph (UK) 10/04/02

THE CHECK’S IN THE MAIL (NOT): When the Washington Chamber Symphony ceased operations earlier this year, many of the folks in charge seemed to vanish into the ether. Months later, subscribers want to know where their ticket refunds are, and the WCS’s creditors are wondering when they’ll be paid as well. Meantime, the people who seem to have run the orchestra into the ground may be too busy pointing fingers at each other to figure out just how the defunct organization can pay off its debts. Washington Post 10/04/02

CRUNCH TIME IN CALGARY: The musicians of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra have offered to take a 12.3% pay cut to keep the orchestra solvent for the rest of the season. It would be the second time in two years that the musicians have taken a large pay cut, but even that may not be enough to save the CPO. Massive deficits and a lack of enowment funds have the orchestra on the verge of folding operations. CFCN-TV (Calgary) 10/02/02

20 SHORT YEARS WITHOUT GLENN GOULD: “If you’re reading this at 11: 30 a.m., it is precisely 20 years since Glenn Gould left this life… Gould must be seen as Canada’s greatest contribution to classical music, as his work continues to inspire a seemingly endless stream of books, films, documentaries and miscellaneous other monuments and remembrances in all corners of the world. He once said that be didn’t believe anybody would come to his funeral. Three thousand people did, and every day many thousands more continue to pay homage to the man by listening to his music over and over again.” Ottawa Citizen 10/04/02

Thursday October 3

JANSONS NEGOTIATING WITH CONCERTGEBOUW: Outgoing Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra music director Mariss Jansons has confirmed that he is in negotiations with Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, considered to be among the top five orchestras in the world, to become its new chief conductor. Jansons has also signed on to lead the Bavarian Radio Symphony in Munich, and says that he will limit his conducting in the near future to those two orchestras, plus those of Berlin, Vienna, London, and Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/03/02

  • TANGLEWOOD WEST? For decades, wealthy Philadelphians have headed north to the Pocono Mountains in the summer to while away the hot Pennsylvania days at one of the luxury resorts in the area. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that one of the state’s two major orchestras is building its new summer home there. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, most recently in the news for deficits and (probably) idle threats of bankruptcy, hopes that its Mountain Laurel Center for the Performing Arts will eventually rival Tanglewood in Massachusetts and Ravinia in Illinois as one of the nation’s great summer music retreats. Certainly, the location can’t hurt: Bushkill, Pennsylvania is 85 miles from New York City and 115 from Philadelphia. (Of course, it’s 320 miles from Pittsburgh.) Philadelphia Inquirer (AP) 10/03/02

WHO NEEDS TASTE IF TASTE DOESN’T MATTER? Those who try to assign the blame for a decline in classical music are usually looking in the wrong places, writes Harvard composer Joshua Fineberg. “The lesson that has been taken from Cage and Duchamp is that if traffic noise and toilet seats are equal to Mozart and Rembrandt then so are Garth Brooks and black-velvet Elvis paintings. This view quickly leads to taste being the only legitimate arbiter. In the cultural realm this rapidly leads to the downward homogenization of taste toward the least common denominator, a phenomenon that makes almost everyone vaguely uncomfortable.” Salon 10/02/02

(ALMOST) FREE SAMPLES: In an attempt to lure consumers back to buying music rather than pirating it, British recording companies have declared Digital Download Day. The scheme “will today offer consumers £5 worth of free downloads from one of five official music sites. More than 100,000 tracks will be available, ranging from Elvis and Coldplay to Kylie and Gareth Gates. For £5, users will be able to listen to 500 tracks online, download 50 tracks on to their hard disk or burn five tracks on to a CD.” The Guardian (UK) 10/03/02

HELP WANTED – INSPIRATION: The English National Opera is looking for a new director. It’s a desirable job (if you can overlook the unfortunate demise of the last incumbent) “True, there’s a bit of financial sorting-out to do – but we are are pretty confident that we can achieve that. And the company will have a fantastic new home in 2004.” So who are the early contenders? Well, almost anyone you can think of… The Guardian (UK) 10/03/02

CMF NAMES NEW DIRECTOR: Catherine Underhill has been named executive director at the Colorado Music Festival in Boulder. The CMF has consistently been one of America’s top summer music festivals, but has struggled with attendance and budget issues in recent seasons. “Underhill, 46, has worked as executive director of the Arts and Humanities Assembly of Boulder (AHAB) and of the Boulder’s Dairy Center for the Arts.” The Daily Camera (Boulder) 10/03/02

ROLLING RIVER: Saint Paul, Minnesota, is a charming little city constantly overshadowed by its more cosmopolitan twin, Minneapolis. So when promoters told city leaders that they wanted to stage a massive arts, film, and music festival on Saint Paul’s increasingly popular riverfront, sponsors and politicians were lined up to support it. But the Rolling River Festival crashed and burned before a single act took the stage, and wound up being basically a smallish film festival showing at various strip-mall-style suburban theaters. Worse, the festival’s organizers are facing accusations that they built up expectations based on nothing more than talk, and never had anywhere near the amount of cash which would have been required for such a large-scale operation. Saint Paul Pioneer Press 10/03/02

BARENBOIM THE PEACEMAKER: Israeli conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim, who has made waves in the Middle East twice in recent months, has co-authored a new book with Palestinian intellectual Edward Said calling for peace in the region. “The book, titled Parallels and Paradoxes, grew out of conversations between the two friends, both prominent cultural figures who first met a decade ago by chance at a London hotel… Last month, [Barenboim] and Said were named the winners of Spain’s Prince of Asturias Concord Prize for their efforts toward bringing peace to the Middle East.” Andante (AP) 10/03/02

Wednesday October 2

HOW BIG MUSIC IS RUINING MUSIC: The music industry is broken. As this week’s $143 million price-fixing settlement shows, big music companies have colluded to artificially inflate the prices of CD’s. Artists are attacking, demanding better contracts and a bigger share of the profits. And instead of fixing anything, the companies blame the people who consume their products. And we should feel sympathy because… Chicago Sun-Times 10/02/02

SF OPERA IN THE RED: Blaming a downturn in the economy and lower attendance since 9/11, San Francisco Opera announced a $7.7 million deficit for last season on its annual operating budget of approximately $60 million. It was the company’s biggest financial shortfall in a decade. The company warns that “in the long term, the economic picture might compel the company to raise ticket prices and possibly even curtail some of General Girector Pamela Rosenberg’s more ambitious – and costly – artistic plans.” San Francisco Chronicle 10/02/02

MUSIC FROM A CAN: Something about the music you’ve been listening to this year that doesn’t seem quite real? “More than two-thirds of the No. 1 hits this year have been by manufactured artists, who have been hand-picked and groomed for stardom by record company talent-spotters, or in television pop contests.” Maybe that’s one reason music sales are down 7 percent this year… The Scotsman 10/01/02

GRIN NOT SMILING: It’s been almost a year since the San Jose Symphony shut down operations. Civic leaders are trying to restart the orchestra, and there’s plenty of talk about how to revive the organization. But there’s one man nobody seems to be talking with – Leonard Grin, the orchestra’s music director. “I’m not involved in any of those committees. I never have been invited to any of those meetings. It’s surprising and frustrating. Who better to help on these committees than the conductor?” San Jose Mercury-News 10/02/02

LABELLING FOR LEGISLATION? Some US Congressmen want the recording industry to include more information in parental advisory warning labels on CD’s. They may be able to force the issue too. “Rep. John Shimkus, Republican of Illinois, said the music industry should improve its labeling to prove its sincerity as it asks Congress for help to fight music swapping over the Internet that hurts record sales.” The Plain Dealer (AP) (Cleveland) 10/02/02

DEUTSCHE OPER DIRECTOR TO QUIT: Deutsche Oper director Udo Zimmermann is quitting the company after his contract expires next July. Zimmermann says he “found himself unable to continue ‘his sophisticated artistic concept in the Deutsche Oper beyond the 2002-3 season,’ in part because of the Berlin’s poor financial condition and the opera’s $1.7 million deficit. Washington Post (AP) 10/02/02

Tuesday October 1

CD SELLERS SETTLE PRICE-FIXING SUIT: Top American music distributors and retailers have agreed to pay $143 million in cash and CDs to settle charges they cheated consumers by fixing prices. “The settlement brings to a close accusations made by attorneys general of 41 states and commonwealths who accused record companies of conspiring with music distributors to boost the prices of CDs between 1995 and 2000.” Nando Times (AP) 10/01/02

BIRMINGHAM WINS: The City of Birmingham Orchestra, stepping neatly out of the long shadow cast by its ex-music director Simon Rattle, has won Gramophone’s recording of the year, beating – among others – Rattle’s new orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic. The Guardian (UK) 10/01/02

REFORM NEEDED FOR MUSIC SCHOOLS: A new report suggests radical reform of England’s music schools. “Backed by leading figures from music and the arts, including Sir Simon Rattle, it concludes that a new range of decidedly non-classical skills should be on the curriculum – including business and technology studies and a knowledge of contemporary styles, including jazz and world music. Nine out of 10 professional musicians are self- employed, it says, and most can make a living only by turning to teaching, session work and composition, as well as traditional concert hall performances.” The Observer (UK) 09/29/02

WINNING FORMULA: Naxos, the budget classical music label, is 15 years old. While other recording companies abandon classical music, Naxos has thrived. “As the pioneering budget-priced CD label, Naxos secured a market foothold it has never lost. With the release of 500 CDs annually and sales of 10 million, it is now the largest classical label in the world. ‘Making a CD today costs not even one dollar. So we can even sell in China, where CDs sell for $2 or $3, and make a small profit’.” Toronto Star 10/01/02

WHEN REHEARSALS GO WRONG: Toronto’s Canadian Opera Company replaced its lead soprano for the opening night performance of Queen of Spades last week after the singer flew to Armenia to her father’s death bed three days before the production’s dress rehearsal. Though she returned in time for the rehearsal, the company replaced her, saying they had told her not to go if she couldn’t be back well in advance of the rehearsal. and that she wasn’t prepared. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/01/02

RATTLE’S NEW REGIME: Simon Rattle has only recently taken over as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic. But his presence is changing the very nature of the world’s most celebrated orchestra. “It’s amazing that this collection of 130 very disparate and opinionated people is able to smell the changing of the seasons, almost like an animal. Many of us felt that there was no way to stop the clock, or turn it back.” The Times (UK) 10/01/02