Italian director Franco Zeffirelli is being awarded a British knighthood. Though Zeffirelli is being commended for his “valuable services to British performing arts”, his knighthood will further tighten already close relations between Tony Blair’s government and that of Silvio Berlusconi.
Blog
Satellite Radio Gets A Boost
Satellite radio appears to be catching on. Both American satellite radio companies are seeing big growth in their number of subscribers, with Sirius expecting to top 1 million by the end of the year. XM projects 3 million subscribers by January.
TV Land – America Is LA, NY
A new study counts the settings for American TV shows and – no surprise – finds most fictional settings are in New York or Los Angeles. “Those two cities account for just under half of the fictional settings for prime-time television shows going back to 1948, according to a new study by a media agency. California and New York state are settings nearly 60 percent of the time — even though those states make up less than 19 percent of the nation’s population.”
NZ Symphony Wants Funding Boost
The New Zealand Symphony says it needs an extra $1.5 million a year from the government to stay healthy. The orchestra already gets $10 million/year in government subsidy. Last year it predicted it would earn a small surplus. It has recorded a $140,000 deficit and fears losses could increase to $1.3 million by 2006-07.
Scots Royal Museum To Get Makeover
Edinburgh’s Royal Museum is a sprawling place, made so by numerous renovations over its 150 years. It’s difficult to navigate, and not up to 21st Century museum standards for storing and displaying art. So now there’s a major plan to make over the complex…
Indianapolis Museum Director Resigns
Anthony Hirschel has resigned as director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, just shy of the opening of the museum’s $74 million renovation. Hirschel, who said he was leaving for personal reasons, had led the museum since 2001.
Neal Pollack’s Bad Book Tour
Neal Pollack says writers have little if any voice in America these days. “Do you have any clue as to the monumental public indifference that awaits the average author on the American road? Writers get less respect in this country than people who eat live bugs on television for money! I just got off three-plus weeks on tour, and I was lucky to get an audience of 15 people–in blue states. It took everything I had just to get someone to buy a copy of my stupid book, much less bring about a permanent transformation of American politics.”
Coming To A Phone Near You – Beethoven
Boosey & Hawkes, the world’s largest classical music publisher has signed a deal to license classical music to mobile phone networks and ringtone retailers. “Several hundred classical hits will be available as ringtones, including Stravinsky’s Petrushka and, at the more popular endof the classical spectrum, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite or Danny Boy. Ringtone sales account for about 10% of the $32bn (£17bn) global record market and are forecast to grow to $5.2bn by 2006.”
An Alternative Universe View Of The New MoMA
“We just had an election that turned, in part, on cultural values—and we Blue Staters lost! Now we have a new modern art museum with a $20 admission fee to divide us further. The paper called MoMA ‘indispensable to our shared cultural legacy,’ but there’s nothing ‘shared’ about the culture on view inside. If the dominant institution in the Red States is the church, then welcome to MoMA, where the Blue States pray! And what a cathedral to Blue State values it is! Looking around the new MoMA, all I saw was sex, death, longing, misery, anguish—and that’s just the café menu.”
Italy Returning Obelisk To Ethiopia
Italy is finally sending a stolen obelisk back to Ethiopia. “The monument is one of a group of six obelisks erected at Axum when Ethiopia adopted Christianity in the 4th century A.D. It was stolen by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1937 and turned into a symbol of fascist power during his short-lived efforts to revive the grandeur of imperial Rome. Despite signing various agreements that promised to return the 1,700-year-old monument, the Italian government showed no signs of doing so until the obelisk was badly damaged by lightning in a thunderstorm in 2003.”