The city of Los Angeles is undertaking a daunting task: “to make sense of — and give context to — a region that has often felt diffuse, imprecise and haphazardly imagined.” In other words, to uncover the “real” L.A., and “identify, catalog and ultimately protect not just its physical ‘built history’ but to provide a sharper portrait of Los Angeles and how it came to be.”
Author: sbergman
Is Broadway Totally Reliant On London?
New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley has been reporting extensively from London this summer, a fact which has not gone unnoticed by British critics. What’s he doing so far from home? “That’s an easy one: because Britain more than ever is relied upon to fuel a New York theatre scene that, in the absence of thinking for itself, likes to import whatever has received the cultural imprimatur of the town’s most influential critic.”
Dallas Art Scene On The Move
Art galleries are springing up everywhere on Dragon Street in Dallas’s Design District, drawn by low real estate prices and the allure of a hot new scene. Of course, gentrification doesn’t happen overnight. “Art connoisseurs new to the area might be surprised to find, as they enter Dragon Street from the south, that the pavement is bumpy and sports more than a few divots and potholes. As with fine art itself, Dragon Street at the moment is a work in progress.”
NEMO Cancelled
“The NEMO music festival — an annual conference that brings artists and industry types to Boston for three days of panel discussions, musical showcases, and a trade show — is taking the year off.” Organizers say that online communication has overtaken the live conference format, and no decision has been made on whether NEMO will be revived in 2008.
Playing With Dolls
“What drove Morton Bartlett to create exquisitely realistic sculptures, dress them, and take pictures of them in evocatively staged scenes is a mystery. Since his death in 1992, though, the Boston-based photographer’s figures have been hailed as works of art.”
Keeping Twin Legacies Alive & Vibrant
“It’s a happy accident that two of the most self-absorbed legends in the history of jazz — the bassist Charles Mingus and the alto saxophonist Art Pepper — married women who wound up equally absorbed in the preservation of their legacies. The men have been dead now for a quarter-century, yet their widows, Sue Graham Mingus and Laurie Pepper, keep unveiling major discoveries.”
The Stunning Success Of El Sistema
Venezuela’s El Sistema, which teaches classical music to underprivileged kids, has a new poster boy in LA Philharmonic music director designate Gustavo Dudamel. But El Sistema’s list of successes goes far deeper than Dudamel. “The road taken by Dudamel… is one along which some 270,000 young Venezuelans are now registered to aspire, playing music across a land seeded with 220 youth orchestras from the Andes to the Caribbean.”
Composers & Computers
The craft of music composition has changed drastically in the last 100 years, and one of the most dramatic changes has been the rise of the computer as a compositional aid. “Personal computers were originally used primarily for musical notation, but as the technology has evolved, their ability to play back music has become more of a concern to the elder composers.”
It Pays The Bills, So What’s The Problem?
Orchestras across North America have been mounting concerts featuring music from the Lord of the Rings movies, and others based on the scores composed for various fantasy-genre video games. Purists may hate such crossover dreck, but they don’t have to attend, and Andrew Adler says that there’s nothing inherently wrong with such middlebrow outreach, so long as orchestras aren’t fooling themselves into thinking that the sci-fi nerds and gaming geeks that turn out for such shows will be similarly tempted by a Mahler symphony.
Are Brits The New Canucks On American TV?
Time was when Canadians could look at the fall lineups of American TV networks and smugly note that a shockingly high percentage of the actors and actresses involved were born north of the border. “Every year, there are at least a dozen names on that list – this one no exception, with another 15 additions. But there’s a surprising new element to this year’s tally: a sudden proliferation of British actors with flawlessly faked accents usurping our traditional role as faux-Americans.”