Washington’s Kennedy Center has big aspirations beyond the beltway. “With its new $125 million education initiative, the Kennedy Center aims to give the performing arts bug to more than 11 million people across the country. The center’s expanded programming targets not only young, would-be art lovers but also art managers, aspiring dancers and musicians, and even board members at other cultural institutions.”
Blog
The Enduring Appeal Of Vintage Musicals?
“Popular culture has turned divisive and pop-based musicals are unlikely to be outings that the whole family can enjoy. What gives the musical form its growing heritage status is an appeal that carries across the generations, from war vets to under-tens, and that is such a precious rarity in our fissured society that it demands conservation and participation. Poised at the midpoint of high and mass culture, musical theatre reaches the parts that more formal arts cannot begin to touch.”
Why Reading Aloud Is So Compelling
What I notice as I sit listening with children is how much harder they concentrate on a heard story than a seen one. They can’t cheat and follow the pictures to make sense of it, so they listen acutely. They ask questions, too: always relevant, though sometimes tangential. You can almost see their brains working.
The Most Popular Music Online? Beethoven
Free downloads of BBC Beethoven symphonies have blown off the lid of the download charts, beating all popular music. “Final figures from the BBC show that the complete Beethoven symphonies on its website were downloaded 1.4m times, with individual works downloaded between 89,000 and 220,000 times. The works were each available for a week, in two tranches, in June. It would take a commercial CD recording of the complete Beethoven symphonies ‘upwards of five years’ to sell as many downloads as were shifted from the BBC website in two weeks.”
Are Libraries Without Books A Good Idea?
“Where will the library ghosts go when all the books have been made immaterial and antiseptic through digitization? What is the message of this new medium? What does it mean when the University of Texas at Austin removes nearly all of the books from its undergraduate library to make room for coffee bars, computer terminals, and lounge chairs? What are students in those “learning commons” being taught that is qualitatively better than what they learned in traditional libraries?”
Prison Inmates Raise Money To Keep Public Library Open
When the town of Salinas, California threatened to close its public libraries to save money, residents rallied. So did inmates at a local prison. “Prisoners in San Quentin’s inmate-to-inmate tutoring program sponsored something of a bake sale for literacy, selling doughnuts, pizza and fried chicken to other prisoners. Today, they will present a $1,000 check to the ailing Salinas Free Library, plus another $500 for literacy services in Marin County. Those sums are nothing to sniff at, given that an inmate with a high- paying prison job makes $56 a month.”
Flushing Bush – Protests Over Political Artwork
Supporters of President George Bush are protesting the display of a painting on display in California’s Department of Justice building in Sacramento depicting “a star-spangled map of United States being flushed down a toilet. The piece, titled “T’anks to Mr. Bush,” is part of an exhibit sponsored by California Lawyers for the Arts. The California Arts Council presented the show in conjunction with the attorney general’s office, and the paintings hang in the building’s cafeteria.”
Now Write Your Way Out Of This One!
The former heads of the Colombian drug cartel are in US prison, where a the government won’t let them pay for their defense with drug money. What to do? Write a book. “Such a book could contain explosive revelations about past connections between the political establishment and the drug trade in Colombia. Former Colombian president Ernesto Samper’s time in office was tainted by claims that the Cali cartel contributed six million dollars to his 1994 electoral campaign, though the congress eventually cleared him of the charges. During its heyday in the 1980s, the Cali cartel controlled 80 percent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States, according to US authorities.”
Gehry And Piano In A New York Makeover
“Frank Gehry and his one-time competitor Renzo Piano are not the house architects of New York City. That distinction belongs to Skidmore Owings and Merrill, the lofty developer to Manhattan’s biggest guns in business and real estate. But the new New York that is taking shape—with its ambitious towers, its cities within a city like the far West Side, Ground Zero and the Atlantic Yards—belongs to these two. So far, the two émigrés seem to be splitting the pie like a couple of New York old-timers.”
New York Museums Puzzled Over City’s Security Funding Plan
Many of New York City’s cultural institutions are asking why the City funded increased security out of a $2 million pot at only three museums. “Insurance costs are off the chart. Since 9/11, it’s the fastest-growing cost of doing business in the world of exhibitions. New York museum officials became particularly worried after the looting of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, speculating that they would face some kind of retribution.”