Where did NEA chairman Dana Gioia get his education? Business school. “Gioia’s self-description has always been more voluminous than the Poet-Businessman shorthand. He is, he says, Latin (of Italian and Mexican lineage), Catholic, and a Californian with working-class roots. He came from East Los Angeles, born in 1950 to a taxi driver father and a telephone operator mother. His youth was spent crisscrossing Los Angeles, in search of new music, and art, and anything else that caught his imagination. He studied the piano, and Latin, and availed himself of the book and record collection left by an uncle killed in a plane crash.”
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Where Did Popular Classical Music Go?
Where is the new classical music? Okay, there’s lots of music being written out there. But “what is the most recently composed piece of classical music to have achieved a genuinely established place in the repertoire? I mean a piece that you can count on hearing in most major cities most years, and a performance of which is likely to bring in a large general audience. Shostakovich’s first cello concerto, written in 1959, perhaps? Even that is stretching a point. A more truthful answer might be Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, composed 56 years ago in 1948.”
Bernstein Partner Wins Suit Against NYU Medical Center
Mark Taylor, Leonard Bernstein’s former partner, has won a lawsuit for wrongful dismissal from New York University Medical Center. “Taylor met Bernstein in 1989. When the composer fell ill it was Taylor who cared for him. Bernstein died in 1990. All the time Taylor remained closeted at work. But, in 1994 he was publicly outed as Bernstein’s lover in a biography. The book also mentioned Farber, who was Bernstein’s doctor. It circulated around the office, with references to Taylor highlighted.”
Another Down Year For Ontario’s Shaw Festival
“Despite an increase in ticket sales over last season, the Shaw Festival has announced a significant deficit for the second consecutive season. At the festival’s annual meeting in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., on Friday, organizers revealed that the 2004 season ended with a deficit of $2.37 million, resulting in an accumulated deficit of $4.4 million.”
Enough With The Book Clubs!
Book clubs, book clubs, everywhere. But so what, writes Li Robbins. Why do you need or want a club in which to read? “Reading is the greatest of great escapes. Reading is permission to simply be, to exist in another world, the world of the book. But you can’t maintain that Zen state when someone is wittering away about plot, tone and setting as though they are the new holy trinity.”
A Hirst “Chapel” In Rome?
American collector Carlo Bilotti is working on setting up a centre for contemporary art which will display works by Damien Hirst and other artists from his collection in a former chapel in Rome. “Mr Bilotti says he aims to create a “modern meditative environment” in the chapel which will be modelled on the Rothko chapel in Houston, Texas.”
Flap Over Upcoming Disney Book
The manuscript of a book critical of Disney was obtained by Disney, and the company is threatening legal action after regretting giving the author access to company execs and records. “Disney dashed off a letter to Simon & Schuster, warning that it would contemplate legal action if the book contained mistakes, according to several people involved in the book’s publication. Simon & Schuster is asking that Disney return the 780-page unauthorized manuscript it obtained, saying Disney should not distribute it to news outlets or other concerns.”
Philip Johnson And Fascism
Philip Johnson’s fascist past was mentioned only in passing in most of his obituaries last week. But “Philip Johnson did not just flirt with fascism. He spent several years in his late 20’s and early 30’s – years when an artist’s imagination usually begins to jell – consumed by fascist ideology. He tried to start a fascist party in the United States. He worked for Huey Long and Father Coughlin, writing essays on their behalf. He tried to buy the magazine American Mercury, then complained in a letter, ‘The Jews bought the magazine and are ruining it, naturally.’ He traveled several times to Germany. He thrilled to the Nuremberg rally of 1938 and, after the invasion of Poland, he visited the front at the invitation of the Nazis. He approved of what he saw.”
Foreign Video Sales are Hollywood’s New Cash Cow
“By most estimates and anecdotal evidence, revenues from international home video sales are the fastest-growing part of Hollywood’s business. The most reliable estimate comes from Screen Digest, a British data company, which calculated that the home video divisions of the United States studios garnered $11.4 billion in wholesale revenues from the $24.6 billion that overseas consumers spent buying and renting home video products in 2004. What is more certain is that the windfall from overseas home video sales is affecting how the movie business is run. It is inflating budgets for films with big international potential.”
Sundance Closes, Documentaries Reign
This year’s Sundance Festival closes in a blaze of awards and respect for documentaries. “It was a weak year for the American dramatic competition and a strong one for documentaries, but the contrast between these groups of movies was not just a matter of quality. In any case, the dramatic jury had no trouble handing out prizes – it seems none of the juries did; there were more than 30 awards given.”