Hot on the heels of a blistering report charging the former chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with misusing funds and undermining the agency’s mission, the CPB’s inspector general is “launching an investigation into whether public television and radio stations around the country inappropriately used federal funds to lobby against threatened budget cuts this summer.” Not surprisingly, the request for the new investigation came from 14 Republican members of Congress, who were infuriated by what they saw as a liberal witchhunt to oust CPB chair Kenneth Tomlinson because of his conservative political views. The inspector general says openly that he doubts he will find any wrongdoing by local stations, but will look into the matter, regardless.
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The New Old Getty
The Getty Villa’s makeover is complete. “The addition operates like an anti-icon. As a means of disguising its bulk, it burrows into the canyon walls that rise on the edge of the site. The carefully choreographed and richly textured pathways that lead, rather indirectly, from a new parking garage to the galleries are lined by high walls faced in horizontal layers of concrete, red porphyry stone, travertine and bronze. They are meant to suggest the striated walls of a huge archeological dig that has unearthed, of all things, the 1974 villa. The overall effect is one of tasteful refinement and restraint — so much so that the architecture, at times, brings to mind a Calvin Klein boutique al fresco.”
The Newly Restored Getty Villa
The Getty Villa is reopening after a $250 million refit. “The complex, designed by Machado & Silvetti Associates of Boston, is genuinely an exquisite work of architecture. Reconfigured as an elaborate architectural narrative, it approaches the historical past with the scholarly attention normally reserved for real ancient ruins. But to what end? The gaudy beauty of the old Getty was its underlying message: the vision of a dying oilman thumbing his nose at the pretensions of the East Coast art establishment. By comparison, the newly expanded villa strives for Old World respectability. And in wrapping the old villa in the aura of good taste, it comes close to embalming it.”
AGs Want Smoking Warning On DVDs
32 state attorneys general have banded together in an effort to convince Hollywood to place anti-smoking warning labels on DVDs. The effort comes on the heels of a new study showing that teens are often convinced to take up smoking when they see movie stars doing so. The studios on the receiving end of the warning label request say they will consider the proposal individually, and warn against any move that would take away filmmakers’ “creative rights to depict human behaviors.”
Die, Youngster, Die!
Putting kids on television has always been a reliable way to get a certain demographic chunk of the population to tune in. But these days, the apple-cheeked youngsters featured in prime time are less likely to spew cuteness than blood. “Television has become an extremely inhospitable place for middle-class children, and in some sense, for the demanding ideals by which they are now raised – a gory receptacle for any and all of our collectively sublimated parental ambivalence. Against our new universe of Humvee-inspired strollers, television constructs a parallel one, in which children are routinely maimed, killed, abused, mocked, mistreated and kept central – but according to a contravening morality.”
The Great Big GoogleLit Debate
“If there was any point of agreement between publishers, authors and Google in a debate Thursday night over the giant Web company’s program to digitize the collections of major libraries and allow users to search them online, it seemed to be this: Information does not necessarily want to be free. Rather, the parties agreed, information wants to be found. But when it comes to how information will be found and who will share in the profits, the various sides remain far apart – not surprising, perhaps, since the issue has already landed in federal court.”
It’s Not Just The Kids Who Are In Trouble
What’s that? You say watching children maimed and killed isn’t your televisual cup of tea? No problem, says Hollywood, we’ve got plenty of adult women being maimed and killed too!
Eats Shoots And (Does It Rudely)
“Two years ago, Lynne Truss was vaulted into unexpected celebrity when, after a long and quiet career as a novelist and critic, she published a short, witty book on punctuation. Initially brought out in London with a hopeful first printing of 15,000 books, ‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation’ went on to sell some three million copies in hardcover.” Now she’s back with another sermon: “Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door.” The book’s basic contention is that people in public places no longer bother to treat one another with even a semblance of Old World courtesy or respect.
Who Would Want This Job?
The much-beleaguered Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre will soon have a new executive director, and he will have his hands full the minute he sets foot in his office on February 1. But even before officially starting work, Harris Ferris (currently head of Nevada Ballet Theatre) is attempting to mend some of the in-house fences that were demolished when the PBT made the decision to lay off its entire orchestra for the 2005-06 season. Ferris will meet with the orchestra this week in what he says is an effort to “eliminate the acrimony,” and to listen to the musicians’ complaints about PBT’s management system. Ferris says it is still possible that the orchestra could return this season, but those comments were undermined when PBT cut ties with its conductor over the weekend.
Movin’ Out On A High Note
“Three years can be a long time in the life of a Broadway musical. Dialogue that once sparkled dims with routine. Performances grow soggy. Cast changes alter the chemistry that once made a show more than the sum of its parts. Even musicals forced into retirement well before a third anniversary can look prematurely aged by the time the last curtain falls. But as it approaches the end of its run on Dec. 11, after more than three years on Broadway, the Twyla Tharp-Billy Joel musical Movin’ Out is an improved model of the sleek, speeding convertible that vroomed onto the stage of the Richard Rodgers Theater in the fall of 2002, to become the most accomplished and most rewarding of the back-catalog musicals that have been washing up on New York stages like so much gaudy flotsam since the Abba gold mine Mamma Mia!“