“At this moment in history, there are two urgent questions, vividly focused in Rio: can this city, the jewel in Brazil’s battered crown, halt the seemingly inexorable process of social disintegration as factions wage war on factions? Drug gangs versus drug gangs; drug gangs versus police; police versus apparently everyone (shocking but true, read on). And can culture, that last life raft of the idealistic, come to the aid of a community’s identity, perhaps ensure its survival?”
Blog
The Hottest Thing In Downloads – Books
“Download fever sweeps the nation, audio stores are the hottest thing on the Internet, and this week’s hottest track is … ‘Hegemony or Survival,’ by Noam Chomsky? That’s right. The killa, must-have MP3 is thrown down by an MIT linguistics professor, at least if you spend time in the expanding universe of downloaded audiobooks.”
Why sorting Out Your Semis From Your Colons
Why did Lynne Truss’s book on punctuation become such a major hit in the UK? “Among the legions of the surprised are the executives at her publishing house, Profile Books, who ordered a modest initial printing of 15,000 books, but now have 510,000 in print; and Ms. Truss’s friends and family.” But why is it such a phenomenon? “Maybe Ms. Truss has indeed touched a nerve of latent pedantry in a world in which, as she writes, increasing numbers of people ‘don’t know their apostrophe from their elbow’.”
Restored To What?
“Many conservators no longer restore objects to approximate their original condition as fine arts museums do, preferring instead to maintain the way they looked when acquired. The aim is to extend their life while retaining the evidence of what made them important, even if it means presenting tattered artifacts with blood stains, bullet holes and burnt edges. Now new techniques and a new emphasis on less varnished truth in history museums are transforming the staid exhibitions of the past.”
The Rise Of Raunchy Art
Sex sells. No surprise there. But nudity and sex have been incresingly making the scene in the contemporary art world. “With the Internet and cable TV making pornography widely available on an anytime-of-day basis, it was probably inevitable that artists would find their own ways to channel it into their work and that galleries would show the results. Consider the New York exhibition season just past, most notable not for nudity, which now sells tickets only on Broadway, but for the number of phalluses in plain view.”
(Belated) Encore
“Encore, an initiative by BBC Radio 3 and the Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS), aims to hunt down orchestral works which have languished since their debut and give them another hearing – just as the Society of Authors’ Encore award promotes second novels that have been overlooked. Simon Rattle has agreed to act as patron for the scheme, which aims to rediscover and perform 15 works over the next four years.”
Making Up History For London Buildings
London has not always been good about preserving its best buildings. As a consequence, “London’s older buildings are often invested with associations that do not belong to them. For instance, there is a 17th-century house just upstream of Shakespeare’s Globe that is commonly said – on no evidence at all – to have been the home of Sir Christopher Wren while St Paul’s Cathedral was being built across the water…”
The New Arts Landscape
Tighter funding, changed attitudes – it’s tough to run an arts organization these days. Chicago-area arts administrators reflect on the new cultural climate: “There’s a strong current of anti-intellectualism around these days, which becomes antielitism, and arts groups tend to be tarred with that charge unfairly. There should be some recognition of the arts as a socializing force. But at least the historical lack of government support for the arts in America means that we have not become dependent on it.”
Jose Cura, Jack Of All Trades
“The Argentinian-born tenor can rightfully boast of being a jack-of-all-trades, and contrary to the expression, becoming the master of every last one: singer, conductor, composer, arranger, instrumentalist (guitar, piano, winds, strings), rugby player, photographer and businessman. But instead of receiving unqualified encouragement for his artistic reach, Cura often finds himself criticized for his craven ambitions.”
Scotland’s Closed Door To The Rest Of The (Literary) World
“In the heydey of Scottish literary openness – the early to mid-nineteenth century – there was eager reciprocity between nations with, say, Walter Scott producing the first English translation of Goethe, along with other German ballads, and German literature in turn being influenced by Scott’s own fiction.” Sadly, that’s no longer true, and it’s very difficult to find translated literature on Scottish shelves.