Blog

Where The Architects Are – Beijing

Beijing is being totally remade. “A city that, until 1990, had no central business district, and little need of it, now has a cluster of glass towers that look like rejects from Singapore or Rotterdam. And these, in turn, are now being replaced and overshadowed by a new crop of taller, slicker towers, the product of the international caravan of architectural gunslingers that has arrived in town to take part in this construction free-fire zone. Rem Koolhaas, Jacques Herzog, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and Will Alsop are all building, or trying to build here.”

Publishers Sue Google

The Association of American Publishers has filed a lawsuit against Google for its print-digitizing project. “The suit was filed on behalf of McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group (USA), Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons. AAP President Patricia Schroeder said that the publishers viewed legal action as a last resort and had filed suit only when Google refused to agree to making separate permissions requests for each in-copyright book it scans in the libraries of Stanford University, Harvard University and the University of Michigan.”

Republicans Take Aim At PBS & NEA (Again)

President Bush has made it very clear that he will veto any tax hike proposed by Congress, even with the cost of rebuilding the Gulf Coast spiralling into the hundreds of billions. That means that all that money will have to be shaved out of other government programs or added to the already bloated deficit. Conservatives, of course, are not traditionally fans of excessive deficit spending, so a group of Republican legislators has been meeting to hash out the necessary cuts to divert money to the rebuilding effort. And as you might expect, first on the GOP’s list of programs to be eliminated are government support for public television and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Welcome To Nollywood!

Hollywood? Old news. Bollywood? Been there, done that. The newest frontier in film is emerging in the unlikeliest of places: Nigeria. “Buoyed by a voracious appetite among Nigerians (population: 128 million) for their own stories, and bolstered by the proliferation of video equipment — allowing for less expensive production costs — this developing nation’s burgeoning film business now produces a whopping 1,000 features a year.” The Nigerian scene (known, of course, as Nollywood) has risen astonishingly quickly from its beginnings in the 1970s, and it is beginning to produce huge stars whose profiles will soon be noticeable even from the cloistered U.S.

Penguin Snaps Up Chinese Novel For $100,000

China’s best-selling novel, The Wolf Totem, is coming to the U.S. Penguin Books has purchased the American rights to Jiang Rong’s 2004 work for $100,000, a record sum for a Chinese book. “The meticulously researched, semiautobiographical tale is built around the lives of wolves told through the eyes of a student sent to work on the Inner Mongolian grasslands. It is set during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong emptied the cities of educated youths to have them work alongside peasants and herders. Critics and readers have praised its exploration of the relationship between man and animal, accurate detail and spiritualistic questioning.”

Envisioning The New Gulf Coast

Rebuilding America’s Gulf Coast will be one of the great design challenges of the age, and last week, a group of 200 urban planners and architects held a six-day conference to discuss the direction the rebuilding effort should take in 11 Mississippi towns devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The result could be a complete rethinking of suburban design in the area, as well as a fullscale overhaul for the city of Biloxi.

And Coming Soon, The Performance Art Version!

“Strunk and White’s legendary Elements of Style was first published in 1959, and in the intervening decades, this little book on language and its proper usage has been force-fed to countless high school English students, who have read it zealously, dog-eared key pages, showered it in graphite love or else completely disregarded and forgotten it, usually at their own risk… [A]ppreciation for this slim volume takes a turn toward the whimsical and even surreal this week, as the Penguin Press publishes the first illustrated edition, featuring artwork by Maira Kalman, and the young composer Nico Muhly offers a finely wrought Elements of Style song cycle, to be given its premiere tonight [at] the New York Public Library.”

South Park As Cultural Signpost

When it debuted in the late 1990s, Comedy Central’s animated hit, South Park, was mainly a “scare-the-horses” addition to the network’s lineup, relying on foul language (from the mouths of its seven-year-old stars, no less) and ever-grosser gags to attract the young male viewers so coveted by advertisers. But nine seasons on, South Park is a bona fide cultural phenomenon that has risen above its own raunch to become an up-to-the-minute social commentary on some of the most controversial issues of the day. Of course, much of the attraction is still in the show’s envelope-pushing antics, but wouldn’t we all be a bit tired of fart jokes by now if they weren’t folded into a fairly sophisticated satire?

McGill Puts Its Money Where Its Music Is

Montreal’s McGill University has debuted an impressive new building housing its school of music. The project was a long time coming – planning began in 1994 for what was originally supposed to be a library and archive – but the final result is one of the more cutting-edge facilities enjoyed by any conservatory in North America. “Designers did not shy away from the chance to align several different research fields into a single, ambitious studio plan. Film soundtracks, multimedia applications, music recording, studio technology, sound engineering and even neurosciences have a home in the new space.” Oh, and did we mention that the architecture is spectacular.