The Australia Council is undergoing a makeover. So what do the reforms amount to? It calls for turning artform “managers” into artform “directors” who will “work towards increasing efficiencies in grant management through more effective systems and grant management processes and through centralising administrative task” (sic). And on it goes, bullet-point by bullet-point. No wonder that a separate idiot sheet, providing council members with prepared answers, rightly predicted they might face the curly question: “So what’s the plan actually for?”
Blog
PBS’s Identity Crisis
Public television is suffering from an identity crisis, executives inside the Public Broadcasting Service and outsiders say, and it goes far deeper than the announcement by Pat Mitchell that she would step down next year as the beleaguered network’s president.
Producer Buys Five Broadway Theatres
“Producer Rocco Landesman became the owner of Broadway’s third-largest theater chain, Jujamcyn Theaters, yesterday. Mr. Landesman, the longtime president of the chain, said he paid less than $30 million for its five theaters to the estate of James H. Binger, the wealthy Minnesotan who was chairman of the company and who died in November.”
Of Intervals And Intermissions
Randy Kennedy takes a tour of New York theatre intermissions. “The tour, fairly random and thoroughly unscientific, took me from the elegant and easeful (two intermissions, one 40 minutes long, during “Turandot” at the Metropolitan Opera) to the middling (bad red wine and strange fashions in a pretty lounge at the Music Box Theater on West 45th Street) to the merely puzzling (a prominent sign announcing the official Champagne of the Classic Stage Company near Union Square, but no Champagne anywhere in sight). In between, several general rules of intermissions were deduced.”
Which Way Radio?
“The radio business may be undergoing its biggest shakeup ever. So many new digital technologies are beckoning to its traditional listeners that it’s hard to know what radio is anymore. It’s no longer limited to the airwaves, thanks to cable TV’s music offerings, the Internet, and one day, perhaps, cellphones. It’s not strictly live because online “podcasters” and others let you download music to play at your convenience. About the only thing that really separates radio listening from, say, uploading music to an iPod is that on radio, someone else plays deejay.”
London: The Season Of Drama
Schiller is the big hit in London this winter. And drama is king. “It has already been a memorable winter for drama in London. There have been three intriguing productions of ‘Macbeth’, one as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s season of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The RSC has also brought in from Stratford-upon-Avon a season of plays from Spain’s Golden Age, and there are some excellent revivals of work by Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan and David Mamet. For a serious, committed theatre-goer, the West End is heaven at the moment.”
Washington Ballet Dancers Vote For Union
Dancers of the Washington Ballet have voted 18-2 to unionize. They’ll be represented by the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA). The vote took place in a secret ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board on Mon., Feb. 14. AGMA represents dancers and opera singers in the United States. In early December 2004, the ballet company’s dancers asked AGMA to represent them and negotiate a collective bargaining agreement on their behalf.”
US Government Releases Confiscated Art Passports
Federal authorities reversed themselves on Thursday and decided to release artwork, including fake passports, that they confiscated last week in Detroit from the luggage of an Austrian artist on his way to set up an exhibit at a museum.
Bigger Type Syndrome
Book sales are down? Maybe books are too small? Or at least the type (think of the oldsters)? “The answer is obvious: publishers are to make books bigger, thereby making space for larger print on the page and solving the malaise affecting literature. Penguin launches its Premium range in the US in the northern summer. ‘We think it will be a more comfortable reading experience, but still at an affordable price’.”
Books As A Contact Sport
“The First Annual TMN Tournament of Books, presented by The Morning News (TMN), a daily online magazine (themorningnews.org/tob), and Powells.com, an online bookstore, is under way. The writers aren’t hacks and they aren’t in a stadium. The fans don’t roar and they don’t judge. But the Web tournament is set up exactly like an N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, with ladders, seeds and head-to-head contests. Round after round, novels from 2004 are pitted against each other until only one of the original 16 is standing. The champion will be announced on Feb. 28. At that point its author may receive a live rooster, which has a cryptic connection to the brother of the writer David Sedaris.”