“[Pittsburgh’s] City Theatre has a new managing director, Greg Quinlan, former managing director of the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in Cleveland. Starting Aug. 15, Quinlan will team with artistic director Tracy Brigden to run the $2.4 million not-for-profit South Side company that owns two theaters and specializes in the production of contemporary plays.”
Blog
Is America Obsessed With Ethics?
How exactly did American life become so saturated with ethical dilemmas? From Deep Throat to Tom DeLay to journalists who invent characters and plagiarize each other’s work, hardly a day seems to go by anymore without someone, somewhere, causing severe moral outrage. “Does that proliferation mean we’ve become a less ethical society? It’s hard to know. One man’s blatant violation can be another’s technicality… Ethical questions that seem clear-cut in theory – I would never lie – can become complicated in reality.” Of course, gray areas of ethics have always existed, but only in the age of instant information and amateur journalism have they become so likely to cause serious problems for so many individuals.
Europeans Take On Google
Amazon and Google have both launched major book-digitizing intitiatives in recent months, and that has publishers outside the U.S. concerned about increased competition and the further encroachment of American corporations on their turf. “Google’s ambitious undertaking has created unease in France over the hegemony of the English language and has led to a European effort to organize an alternative library scanning initiative.” Now, a group of German publishers have started their own digitizing project as well, in an effort to head Google off at the pass. Still, given the financial resources available to Google and Amazon, the European projects have to be considered a long shot.
Boy Choir Falls Short Of Recruits
Europe’s oldest boys choir school has fallen on hard times. “For centuries, parents brought their 9- to 14-year-old boys to the choir and its music school, known as the Escolania of Montserrat, then part company for most of the next 11 months. But in recent years, fewer parents in Catalonia, this northeastern region of Spain, have been willing to send their children away for so long. When only 8 students were admitted last year from a pool of 20, the fewest number of candidates in recent decades, it was clear the future of the school, which dates to at least the 13th century, was at stake.”
Shriver Wins Orange
Lionel Shriver has won the tenth £30,000 Orange Prize for Fiction for her seventh book, We Need to Talk About Kevin, a novel about a mother’s hatred for her son.
LACMA Hires A New Prez From Within
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has found half of the team it plans to install to replace departing president and director Andrea Rich. “Melody Kanschat, a 16-year administrator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, will take over the museum’s presidency July 1, museum officials said. The move is part of the restructuring that will make the presidency the second-ranking job in the institution.” The top job will be director, and LACMA’s search to fill that position is ongoing.
Everything Must Go!
“Over the next three months, Miramax Films, founded and operated by brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, will release at least 10 movies, including seven films that have been gathering dust on the studio’s shelves for up to four years. The backlog is so profound that the directors of three of those films have started, filmed and almost completed new movies with other studios in the time it has taken Disney-owned Miramax to bring their earlier films to theaters… The release of several of the Miramax movies was held up partially by the very public divorce of the Weinsteins and Disney, which bought the studio in 1993. With the Weinsteins set to leave Disney and Miramax on Sept. 30, the brothers say they are determined before their exit to supervise the debuts of movies they produced and purchased.”
The Right-Wing Folk Machine?
In North America, folk music has traditionally been the purview of the political left, the stripped-down performance of protest representing a quaint, if frequently ineffective, method of protest against the powerful. But in Israel, it is the far right which has embraced folk music, using it to protest Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to pull Jewish “settlers” out of the Gaza Strip. As in most folk music, subtlety is cast aside, and the message is clear: this land is our land.
Scholars On A Mission
Eight decades ago, a book collector from Cleveland gathered an impressive array of medieval manuscripts, then divided them into 40 boxes and dispersed them to locations around the world, in an effort to increase the accessibility of such rare antiquities. But over the years, scholars had lost track of the boxes, and the collector’s vision was never truly realized. Now, two Canadian scholars are hard at work tracking down the boxes (they’ve found 33 already,) with the aim of digitally reconstructing the original manuscripts so that they can be shared with the entire world.
AGO 70% To Goal
“The Art Gallery of Ontario announced yesterday it has raised more than 70 percent of the CAN$254-million it says it needs to bring superstar architect Frank Gehry’s renovation to fruition by spring, 2008, and not coincidentally pay off ‘a little bit’ of the debt from the AGO’s last $60-million expansion, in 1993… The gallery has earmarked CAN$30-million of the anticipated CAN$254-million for the administration and maintenance of its collections, with another $5-million going into a fund to acquire Canadian and international contemporary art.”