John Karls is an audience member of the most devoted sort. Not only does he regularly shell out upwards of $200 for the most expensive seats in the house at countless ballet and opera performances, he scrapes up a few extra dollars every night for a top-shelf bouquet, which he will then heave in the direction of whichever performer pleases him most. “He has attended upward of 2,500 performances and tossed some 750 bouquets in a career spanning more than half a century… Mr. Karls uses a two-handed toss not unlike that of a hammer thrower… The real issue is wind resistance: the cellophane wrap can cause significant drag and can make a bouquet do what Mr. Karls calls a ‘dying duck’ over the orchestra pit.”
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Plenty Of Cash, But Lots Of Tough Decisions
“When the New Jersey State Council on the Arts convenes its annual meeting in Trenton on Tuesday, the highlight will be the awarding of annual grants — expected to be somewhere around $22 million, or some $6 million more than last year. Thanks to last year’s passage of a hotel-motel occupancy fee, the arts council has a dedicated funding source that brings its 2005 budget to $22.68 million — the largest state appropriation in the history of the agency. The infusion of money will allow the arts council to pump millions more into the state’s museums, theaters, dance companies and performing arts centers. [But] that doesn’t mean everyone will be happy.”
Cellist Wanted: Must Be Perfect In Every Way
There is no ensemble more tightly connected than a string quartet, so when a major quartet loses one of its members, as Canada’s St. Lawrence String Quartet did two years ago, finding a replacement who is both musically and personally compatible with the rest of the group can be a nearly impossible task. The St. Lawrence thought they’d found their new cellist, only to discover after a year that the match wasn’t quite made in heaven. Now, the group is trying to fill the hole again, and American cellist Chris Costanza is “[fitting] in as naturally as if he had been playing with the others since the beginning.”
Government Putting Avant-Garde Architects On Notice
The wholesale renovation of Chicago’s historic Soldier Field (home of the NFL’s Bears) has been roundly panned by football fans and architecture critics alike since it was completed last year, and now, the federal government has weighed in with its own verdict on the ultra-modernist redesign, stripping the stadium of its place on the list of National Historic Landmarks. The decision “sent a message that resounds far beyond Chicago’s aesthetically mangled lakefront football stadium: The government will react — and strongly — if avant-garde architects and arrogant politicians sack the nation’s most extraordinary places.”
Royal Albert Hall Loses It Pipes
“Its 9,990 pipes were designed to resonate to the ends of the Empire and have been painstakingly restored in a three-year, £1.7 million project – but Britain’s largest organ fell silent last night. Royal Albert Hall bosses confirmed today that the mighty instrument, known as The Voice of Jupiter, suffered an electrical fault before an evening BBC Proms performance. Technicians were today bidding to determine the cause of the mystery problem, which set in following a successful afternoon recital.”
Why Critics Shouldn’t Be Cheerleaders
A few former board members of the now-defunct Florida Philharmonic are still furious with local critic Lawrence Johnson for several articles he wrote pointedly criticizing the organization’s management and board. In fact, a recent letter to the editor of Johnson’s paper accuses the critic of actually having contributed to the orchestra’s demise by pointing out failings rather than rallying the public to support the floundering ensemble. Johnson isn’t buying it: “Overpraising mediocrity subverts that [critical] duty and serves only to reward lazy or inept artistic leadership. When the third-rate is praised to the skies, there’s zero incentive for those organizations to ever strive to improve.”
Microsoft Puts Slate On The Block
One of the original online magazines is for sale. Slate, the web-only mix of politics, news, arts, and humor which was created by Microsoft in 1996, isn’t actually losing money, but in a year in which Microsoft’s MSN business division, which includes Slate, is looking to tighten up operations, the company is listening to offers for the first time. Microsoft is stressing that Slate will continue to be published, regardless of whether a buyer is found, and there will not be a sale just for the sake of a sale.
Getting Smaller To Increase Visibility
“For years, American cartoonists have complained that their world is getting smaller. Plagued by slumping readership and beholden to high profit margins, daily newspapers are busy reducing the size of comics and cutting those that fail to gain support from older readers. Meanwhile, cartoonists who want to try something different, like mammoth Sunday strips, sometimes get the cold shoulder from editors. So it’s ironic that the next big thing in the comics world is a small cell-phone screen. But the distributors of strips from Crankshaft to Dick Tracy are working to get a foothold in that tiny space, and at least two cartoonists say they’re thrilled to get the exposure.”
The Stooges Get A Literary Pedigree
“Screenwriter David Sheffield won this year’s Faux Faulkner contest by imagining what it would have been like if William Faulkner… had written for the Three Stooges. Sheffield’s 550-word script, “As I Lay Kvetching,” has Moe, Larry and Curly renovating a home with the eye-gouging, nose-twisting slapstick guided by plenty of Faulknerian stage directions: ‘At last it is Curly who picks up the plank, rough hewn and smelling of sweet gum, and — feeling the weight and heft and fiber of it — swings it innocently (bending to retrieve the tool, the ball-peen hammer dropped casually on Larry’s toe) and feeling the awful force of the blow as it (the plank) catches Moe upside his head.'”
Pushing Absolutely No Hot Buttons
Whatever happened to the grand old art of political buttons? Once upon a time, a presidential election brought us such memorable and wearable gems as “I Like Ike” and “I’m Daft About Taft” – and few could forget the classic Goldwater button that emphatically declared “In your heart, you know he’s right,” and the anti-Goldwater parody that shot back, “In your heart, you know he’s nuts!” These days, though, every button from every campaign looks the same – blue backgrounds, American flags, the names of the candidates, and nothing else. At what point did one of America’s cleverest forms of politicking become such a deadly bore?