Confusion surrounding unemployment tax law in Oregon has forced the cancellation of at least one summer music festival, and is putting many other nonprofit music organizations at risk. “The issue revolves around whether musicians hired for concerts are independent contractors, responsible for paying their own unemployment taxes, or regular salaried employees, with their employers responsible for such taxes.” The nonprofits have always paid their musicians as independent contractors hired for a limited period of time, and relied on them to cover their own tax burden, but the state is now claiming that the musicians are salaried. For many groups, there simply isn’t any extra money in the budget for unemployment tax, making the dispute a potential life-and-death matter for a few organizations.
Month: April 2005
Exodus From Portland
The arts scene in Portland, Maine, is experiencing an almost complete turnover, the likes of which have never been seen before. The creative heads of the city’s leading theatre company and symphony orchestra are departing, the curators of two prominent museums are leaving as well, and the city’s college of art and public library will shortly be headless, too. “Collectively, these changes constitute the most significant loss in arts leadership in decades and are cause for concern. The arts community is vulnerable in the best of circumstances. Take away a significant number of leaders, and the institutional knowledge that goes with it, and those vulnerabilities become more acute.”
Andy Slept Here
Plans are afoot to renovate and restore the Pittsburgh home inhabited by a young Andy Warhol and his family. The house is in “terrible shape,” and no one seems even to know who, if anyone, owns it. Even restored, it would likely not fetch much of a price. Still, Warhol’s brother and his partners are hoping that the artist’s name will be enough to spark interest in preserving the structure.
Many A Tale To Tell
“For Hans Christian Andersen, life wasn’t so much a fairy tale as a nightmare. Or so it seems. Though he was Denmark’s most famous literary son, and a prolific author in many genres, Andersen never fully revealed himself. Today, 200 years to the day after he was born, Andersen remains something of a mystery. But he has also become an indelible feature of global culture… Now, to celebrate the occasion, more than 3,000 events have been organized around the world,” and the reexamination of the cobbler-turned-storyteller’s legacy turns up an interesting idea. “As it turns out, Andersen is one of those figures who may be better suited to the 21st century than he was to the 19th.”
Jessye Norman Pulls Out Of Opera Premiere
Jessye Norman has pulled out of the $2 million premiere of a new opera written with her in mind. “Composed by Richard Danielpour with a libretto by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, “Margaret Garner” tells the story of a fugitive slave who kills her children rather than raise them in bondage. Norman was slated to sing all five performances as Cilla, the sympathetic mother-in-law to Margaret. Danielpour tailored the role for Norman’s dynamic voice and dignified carriage, and he said in an earlier Free Press interview that the moment the opera became real to him was the moment she agreed to participate.”
Advertising That Pretends It Isn’t
As consumers grow more and more weary of a marketing-driven culture and become more inclined to tune out commercial messages, advertisers are getting seriously creative in their efforts to move product. In fact, the new breed of (usually) satirical ads look more like short films than product pitches, and some lucky companies have succeeded in making their brand not only a household name, but a cultural milepost. “Humor is the best way to cut through the multichannel clutter in the age of cable and satellite TV,” and the most successful of the new ads are “simply co-opting images television viewers are bombarded with daily.”
Infotainment Comes To The Sports World
Sports are beloved by fans largely because of the opportunities they present for dramatic finishes, for those heart-in-your-throat moments of great success and even greater failure. One of the greatest sports cliches is “You couldn’t have scripted it any better.” But of course, you usually could have, and the entertainment industry does so on a regular basis. Perhaps as a result of the inherently similar qualities of drama in sports and in entertainment, the line between the two worlds has blurred considerably in recent years. “Sports events are more and more about the personalities and subplots… Meanwhile, entertainment has become all about competition.”
Spring Forward, For No Good Reason At All
Well, here we are again, Daylight Savings Time, and for what? For whom? Nobody knows, it would seem, and those who think they do are almost invariably wrong. Daylight Savings is there to help farmers? Nope. They hate it. Foisted on the nation by a meddling, monolithic federal government? Not true, either. “The custom rests on an illusion: that we are doing something to time — yielding an hour in the spring, recovering it in the fall. Of course, it’s not so.” And as with so many wacky ideas firmly entrenched in the American mind, this one can be traced back to that king of deep thoughts and strange utterances, Benjamin Franklin.
The Andersen Filter
A lust for lasting fame drove Hans Christian Andersen above all else, a dream that seemed far-fetched at the time. But Andersen’s fairy tales hid deeper meanings that ensured his celebrity would last far beyond his lifetime. “It is almost impossible to experience certain situations without running them through a subliminal Hans Christian Andersen filter and coming up with a succinct, acerbic take. Your co-worker who is forever dissatisfied with the adjustments on her ergonomically impeccable chair? Yes, she’s the Princess and the Pea. The president from not-your-political-party is touting his new plan for the budget/war/economy/environment? More emperor’s new clothes, you snort… These are handy concepts.”
A New Generation Of 9/11 Books
Bookstores are heavy currently with books having to do with 9/11 in some way. “These books are at the forefront of a second wave of creative works related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The first wave included predictable spasms of simple-minded jingoism and commercial calculation, from bullying country music ballads to cloying hagiographies of political figures eager to make hay out of the nation’s grief. But now we’re getting the good stuff.”