Bob Geldof is in on a new arts center in Camden Town in the north of London. “There is a buzz about the Roundhouse that is reminiscent, to those of us who were kids at the time, of Camden Town in the Sixties and Seventies: a place where our world was remade in a purple haze of invention. The risk is high when you let the streets in, but what other way is there to understand what’s going on?”
Blog
Why UK Orchestra Players Are Quitting
“One could argue that in this country we do not get the orchestras we deserve: we get far, far better than that. And it is the players who are subsidising us. String players are the rank and file of the orchestra, the infantry. Of the 600 or so orchestral string players in full-time work across the country, few earn more than £25,000 a year. Many are on much less. Orchestral rates of pay in western Europe are high, where a premier-league player can earn up to £50,000. In America, where there is no state funding for the arts and orchestras rely mainly on private sponsorship, the average starting salary is $58,000 (£32,805), more than one and a half times that of British recruits. But it’s not just the money and lack of career advancement that prompts some players to hang up their bows…”
Art Loss Register Helps Find Long-Missing Paintings
“The mystery surrounding the theft of seven French Expressionist paintings from a wealthy American collector almost 30 years ago has been solved by a London court case. The canvases, worth at least £20m, are thought to have shuttled back and forth for decades between Massachusetts, Monaco, a Swiss bank vault and the British offices of Sotheby’s.”
Academy Awards Still A Tough Scene For Women
“You know it’s a bad year for women when none of the best picture nominees even features one in a lead performance. Both Good Night, and Good Luck and Munich present almost entirely hermetically sealed male universes, while Brokeback Mountain, Capote and Crash feature women as ignored wives and gal pals… [Historically,] only 7% of the 250 top-grossing films were made with female directors. No woman has ever won the best director Oscar; only three have been nominated.”
Can They Order Viewers To Watch It?
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is ordering Canada’s commercial broadcasters to increase their investment in homemade drama from an average of 3.3% of gross revenues to 6% over a five-year period. “Similarly, the CRTC is now requiring the networks, through marketing and scheduling, to boost the viewing of English-language drama programming so that by 2008-2009, Canadian productions will enjoy at least 16.5 per cent of the networks’ total drama viewership.”
Prestiwhointhewhatnow?
It’s rare that a new word can be coined, popularized, and made an official part of the language through the efforts of a single individual. But that hasn’t stopped Professor James Vanden Bosch of Michigan’s Calvin College from pursuing a one-man crusade to get his favorite made-up word – presticogitation – into the Oxford English Dictionary. Vanden Bosch has actually done a remarkably good job of convincing his studnts over the years to use the word in their writing, but the folks at OED are a much tougher sell.
Frey Dropped By Agent
James Frey’s literary agent has dropped him in the wake of the scandal over his fictionalized memoir. The agent, Kassie Evashevski, also acknowledged that Frey inquired into the possibility of publishing A Million Little Pieces as a novel rather than a non-fiction work, but she says that the reason he gave was his desire to spare his family any embarrassment, and that he never admitted that large chunks of the book weren’t true.
When Is A Producer Not A Producer?
A minor uproar has broken out in Hollywood over new rules imposed on who can and cannot receive an Oscar in the production category. At issue is the old industry habit of giving producer credits to far more people than actually do serious production work on a given film. “The ad-hoc nature of moviemaking on the margins can lead to some hurt feelings or worse, and the situation is now compounded by growing fussiness about credits among those who grant awards, including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.”
It’s The Venue, Stupid
“Classical music is defined, in part, by where it’s played. If it’s at Avery Fisher Hall, it’s probably classical; if it’s at CBGB, it’s probably not.” And while it might take more than a dingy club setting and a fully stocked bar to convince some audiences to give classical a try, an increasing number of young classical performers seem to believe that it really is the forbidding stodginess of concert halls that separates them from rock stars. “The studied formality of the concert hall is increasingly unfamiliar to today’s audience, not to mention ticket prices that can put off even diehard music lovers… In a club setting, people aren’t under the same social constraints as in a recital hall.”
Peru Not Happy With Yale Exhibit
“By any conventional measure, Yale’s exhibition about Machu Picchu would seem a windfall for Peru. As one of the most ambitious shows about the Inca ever presented in the United States, drawing over a million visitors while traveling to half a dozen cities and back again, it has riveted eyes on Peru’s leading tourist attraction. Yet instead of cementing an international partnership, the exhibition… has brought a low ebb in the university’s relations with Peru. At issue are a large group of artifacts that form the core of the show, excavated at Machu Picchu in a historic dig by a Yale explorer in 1912. The government of Peru wants all of those objects back.”