Month: April 2005

An Amazing Breakthrough: Scholars Decode Sophocles, Euripides…

For a century, scholars have been trying to read a vast trove of ancient Greek and Roman texts. “Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed. In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia.”

The New Face Of Iowa Writers’ Workshop

Lan Samantha Chang will take over running the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop in January. “Ms. Chang will teach a graduate fiction workshop, choose students for the fiction program (poetry students are chosen by the poetry faculty) and will consult on hiring, among other duties. The two-year program, which leads to a master’s in fine arts, has no specific academic course requirements. The fiction workshop, which became a full-fledged program in 1936, receives 750 applications for 25 places, and there are 450 poetry applications for 25 places.”

Wanted: Miracle Worker For Scottish Opera

Scottish Opera is looking for a new leader. But who would want to take on such a precarious company, whose recent history is pocked with controversy. “What’s needed is someone with the rare combination of vision and experience to juggle the financial and practical necessities with the artistic skills to successfully fire this esoteric artform. Scottish Opera is there for the taking – and for the making. Inexperience or mediocrity would be disastrous…”

Miking The Opera (Okay, Calm Down…)

“For at least 50 years, amplification has regularly been used in opera houses for oracles and offstage voices. It has also been used to transmit the sound of the orchestra to the singers, and vice versa, and to circulate the sound of the ongoing performance throughout the backstage area.” But talk about amplification in the opera house and suddenly everyone gets skittish…

Is Modernist Architecture A Mistake?

“The history of modernist architecture is like a highway whose exits are abstract theories about what contemporary architecture should be. Instead of a home for architecture such as it knew when tradition ruled, each exit leads to a dead end. So the architect gets back on the highway to nowhere and heads for the next exit, and the next dead end. The result has been an extreme stylistic instability involving recurring discoveries of new modes of artistic dysfunction. You can’t make a city more beautiful on these terms.”

DVD’s Now Drive The Movie Biz

“The avalanche of money generated by DVDs has transformed Hollywood, swinging profitability from the multiplex ticket window to the Wal-Mart checkout line. Income from the sale and rental of new movies, television series and classic films accounts for as much as 60% of a major studio’s profits, as DVDs have become a consumer electronics phenomenon. Yet even in a business that trumpets every nickel of box-office grosses, a title’s precise DVD profits remain one of the industry’s best-kept — and, increasingly, most divisive — secrets.”

The New Vaudeville Is Off-Off

“There are still plenty of musicals and one-man shows on Broadway, but the classic boulevard comedy – once the backbone of commercial theater – has become scarce. By contrast, Off Off Broadway, home base for the avant-garde of Big Ideas and Serious Intentions, is filled with vaudevillian high jinks and lowbrow satire.”

Does The Met Need A Star System?

The Metropolitan Opera is doing okay, but not as well as it used to. So what would set the buzz just a little bit higher? “Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Met were to set up shop as a star factory along the lines of MGM in the 1930’s, leveraging the reputations of its best talents in its own institutional interest.”