Ken Sprague, who has died of cancer aged 77, once said that his aim was “to build a picture road to socialism, to the Golden City or, as Blake called it, Jerusalem”. A painter, sculptor, muralist, banner-maker and sometime television presenter, he was, for half a century, a regular, if dissenting, cartoonist for the Daily Worker, its successor, the Morning Star, and for papers like Tribune and Peace News.
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Because What Angry Drivers Really Want Is A Soundtrack
London has never been able to alleviate the terrible traffic bottleneck at Vauxhall Cross on the Thames embankment. But a choir group believes that music might be the next best thing to free-flowing traffic. All day today, groups of eight singers will be serenading frustrated drivers trapped at the intersection with an 18th-century work supposedly once performed on the spot. “The performance is being recorded, complete with squealing brakes, horns and swearing motorists, and will be played tonight in the tranquillity of Tate Britain.”
The Bassoonist Who Saved Orchestra Hall
Paul Ganson is retiring as a bassoonist in the Detroit Symphony. But his instrument is not how his colleagues will remember him best. Ganson is a legend in the Detroit music community, not just for his playing, but for a crusade that he undertook 34 years ago to save the city’s Orchestra Hall. “In September 1970, Orchestra Hall was about to be demolished and replaced by a fast-food operation, a sorry end to a proud history. The concert hall, an acoustical wonder even in its failing condition, was built in 1919…” but the DSO hadn’t performed there in years. It would take a miracle to save the dying building, and a miracle is exactly what Ganson delivered.
It Takes A Village To Lift A Plotline
Fans of popular children’s book author Margaret Peterson Haddix have been contacting her recently to ask if she is aware that filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan has appropriated the plot of one of her novels for his new suspense film. In fact, the plotline of The Village, which grossed more than $50 million in its opening weekend, is srikingly similar to that of Haddix’s 1995 book, Running Out Of Time. Shyamalan was also accused of stealing the plot of his 2002 film, Signs, from a Pennsylvania screenwriter.
Newspaper Pulls Nude Art Ad
The Baltimore Sun recently refused to run an ad for a local art gallery which featured a “stamp-sized, black-and-white reproduction of a nude,” citing the conservative bent of the paper’s readership. The owner of the gallery is puzzled: after all, the Sun regularly runs ads for strip clubs and massage parlors. Furthermore, “on its news pages, The Sun has repeatedly published artistic images of nudes, including paintings and sculptures by Henri Matisse, Michelangelo’s David, and renderings of Honore Balzac by Auguste Rodin.”
The Grey Lady Gets Retro
The New York Times has been publishing fiction this summer alongside its news reports. (No Jayson Blair jokes, please.) Specifically, the Times is trying to single-handedly bring back the phenomenon of the serialized novel, printing entire well-known works of literature in its pages over the course of a week or two. (The serials are apparently running only in New York editions of the paper.) The paper is waiting to review the circulation numbers before deciding whether to continue with the program.
Too Much of a Good Thing in Chicago?
Even as Chicago struggles to preserve the reputation of its international art fair, Art Chicago, the stage is being set for a major “art war” in the Second City. As things stand now, Chicago will see not one, not two, but three major art fairs next summer, all within weeks of each other, and all insisting that they are the real Chicago art fair. A battle for top exhibitors and the high-rolling collectors they attract is already raging.
Judd Done Before He Starts in Kuala Lumpur
Conductor James Judd’s contract as the new music director of the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra has been terminated a year before he was to officially take up the position. Neither side is saying what caused the split. Judd, who is currently music director of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, also led the now-defunct Florida Philharmonic before resigning during that orchestra’s much-publicized battle between musicians and management.
Blame Canada (and Enforce Those Trade Rules!)
“Out-of-work film technicians – those actors, prop men and other entertainment industry workers whose names unfurl on the screen as moviegoers scramble out of the theater – are rallying behind international trade rules to stem the flow of film and television production to Canada. With the Teamsters leading the fight, the Film and Television Action Committee… has sent 20 pages of comments to the new Unfair Trade Practices Task Force of the Commerce Department and demanded that the Bush administration take action against Canadian film subsidy programs, which have lured United States filmmakers north of the border and siphoned tens of thousands of jobs out of the country.”
New Foote Play Gets A Look
A recently unearthed play by Horton Foote has been hauled out of a desk drawer and thrust onto a New York stage this summer for its first “major commercial production.” But unlike many unpublished works by well-known playwrights, which tend to be underdeveloped and youthfully insecure, Foote’s work, which received its premiere at Whittier College in 2000, is a mature play, written when the author had already achieved a great deal of critical acclaim. “The reason it has not been staged before has more to do with his gentlemanly sense of propriety than any reluctance by a producer to stage it.”