A Sam Walton heir puts up tens of millions to start a dance company. The dancers get decent salaries, a new studio and a full season in which to work. So why is the company’s morale low?
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The 10,000-Year Wonder-Clock
A clock being built in Southern California is being constructed to be accurate for 10,000 years. “Everything about this clock is deeply unusual. For example, while nearly every mechanical clock made in the last millennium consists of a series of propelled gears, this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days. Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years. Unlike any other clock, this one is being constructed to keep track of leap centuries, the orbits of the six innermost planets in our solar system, even the ultraslow wobbles of Earth’s axis.”
Louisiana Musicians Turn Down NY Gig Replacing Strikers
Musicians of the Louisiana Philharmonic were excited at prospects of a 10-week gig playing at radio City Music Hall in New York for $1,600 a week. Since the musicians are out of work, it seems like a dream opportunity. But then the players discovered they would be replacing striking colleagues…
Broadway Shows Top the $100 Mark
“Three of New York’s most popular musicals boosted their top everyday ticket price 10% this month — exceeding the $100 ceiling that had held steady for more than four years. The increase was the first since “The Producers” spurred a wave of $100 tickets in April 2001. The latest move comes at a time of rising production costs for ever-more-elaborate shows. It helps that attendance is finally back to pre-Sept. 11, 2001, levels. Twenty weeks into the season, overall box-office receipts are up 11% from last year, and attendance has increased 6.6% in the same period.”
UK: Let’s Keep Our Writers’ Papers At Home
There’s a new campaign in the UK to try to stop the papers of important writers from being bought up by American institutions. “The campaign comes amid fears that the papers of Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day, may go abroad. All three are understood to have been approached recently by agents acting for institutions in America. In recent years British authors whose papers have been sold abroad include the novelists Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes and Malcolm Bradbury and the playwrights David Hare and Tom Stoppard.”
Shanghai Makes A Big Play For The Visuals
“The forces of growth that have filled Shanghai’s sky with construction cranes — China’s national bird, in current parlance — have sparked a profusion of nonprofit exhibition spaces and commercial galleries devoted to avant-garde art. Against the odds, these showcases have popped up in a central park, a historic pedestrian street, a suburban shopping mall, abandoned banks and a derelict industrial complex. Beijing remains the undisputed cultural capital of China, but Shanghai is fashioning a role for itself as a distinctive place to see new art made in China and elsewhere.”
Bloomberg: WTC Developer Needs To Go
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the troubled rebuilding of the World Trade Center Site project would be better off if developer Larry Silverstein was booted out. “Abandoning his usually bland statements of support, the mayor said for the first time that New York would be better off if Silverstein were booted from the site. ‘It would be in the city’s interest to get Silverstein out, [but] nobody can figure out how to do it yet. And can you imagine the stink if you gave him half a billion dollars or a billion dollars in profit to get him out’?”
Graves’ New Children’s Theatre Fails To Soar
Minneapolis’ Children’s Theatre is one of the best in the country. And it has a new home, as designed by the eminent Michael Graves. “The spaces added in the $27 million expansion – a flexible 275-seat theater, a welcoming rotunda, an impressive education center and greatly enlarged backstage facilities – will advance the theater’s enlarged mission and ensure its cultural legacy. But its workmanlike exterior does not advance Twin Cities architecture.”
How Technology Has Changed Music And Musicians
Seems there’s new technology every day to change the way we get music. Historically, “Mark Katz argues convincingly that technology has been instrumental in determining the types of music and musicians that have achieved popularity. “
Product Placement – Musicians’ Suits That Wick The Heat
Players in the London Symphony have been testing out new concert clothes. “Marks & Spencer have been testing their special new high-tech dinner suit on players performing with Glyndebourne Festival Opera in Sussex over the summer. Made from Coolmax, a breathable fabric previously used only in high performance sportswear, the suits move moisture away from the body to the outside of the material in a process that is often described as wicking.”