Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins is leaving the Voice after 30 years. “I don’t like writing short, and it’s time. In jazz, time is all. I’m as besotted with jazz as ever, and expect to write about it till last call, albeit in other formats. Indeed, much in the way being hanged is said to focus the mind, this finale has made me conscious of the columns I never wrote.” Maybe in a blog on ArtJournal?
Blog
Hentoff: Why Aren’t American Librarians Protesting Abuse Of Cuban Librarians?
“While American librarians — whom John Ashcroft calls “hysterics”—deserve credit for being on the front line against this secret fishing for subversives, none have been threatened with prison time by Ashcroft. But 10 librarians in Cuba have been put away for 20 years and more for not going along with Castro’s endless Banned Books weeks.” So why aren’t American librarians protesting that?
Canadian Recording Industry To Sue Uploaders
The Canadian recording industry says it is going to begin suing uploaders of music. “Any litigation would be a course of action we are really being forced into. It’s a process that’s a last resort, to try and address the huge problems, because the industry’s lost 30 per cent of its retail base since 1999. The losses [in Canada] are in excess of $425-million.”
Canada’s Cultural Leaders Ask: Hélène Who?
Since Canada’s new prime minister named Hélène Chalifour Scherrer to head the country’s culture ministry, cultural groups have been asking Hélène who? She is unknown in the cultural world. “Her very specific interest in amateur sport and the cries of rapture with which the Canadian Olympic Committee greeted her appointment to the portfolio, which does includesport, suggests she may lack the broad vision needed to tackle the large range of regulatory and funding issues that lie at the core of the Canadian Heritage mandate. Comments made to the CBC by her spokesman immediately after her swearing-in about running a “tighter ship” at a ministry that wasn’t going to be a “bank” any more didn’t help.”
Playing Favorites – What Your “Favorite Book” Says About You
“What’s your favorite book?” is a stupid question. “Really, it’s not about books at all, it’s about distinguishing yourself through your distinctions, choosing a work that gives the fullest picture of the person you’d like the world to consider you to be. That’s why everyone always says Catch-22 – not because they think Heller to be easily as good as Roth, Mailer, Updike and Vonnegut rolled into one. No one thinks that. It’s because of the myriad excellent messages enjoyment of this book gives off – I have a fine sense of humour; I’m anti-war and probably broadly leftwing; I have a healthy, questioning disrespect for authority; I like a bit of nooky, but not in a mean way, not like that Rabbit or that Zuckerman; and I’m highly intelligent, but I won’t get all in your face about it. You probably want to go out with me, it says, and you’re dead right.”
Of Rings, Wagner and Tolkien
Lord of the Rings certainly has a Wagnerian feel, writes Alex Ross. And not just because rings are at the center of the two epics. “Tolkien refused to admit that his ring had anything to do with Wagner’s. ‘Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased,’ he said. But he certainly knew his Wagner, and made an informal study of ‘Die Walküre’ not long before writing the novels. The idea of the omnipotent ring must have come directly from Wagner; nothing quite like it appears in the old sagas.”
The New Divas
“This fall has seen a remarkable outpouring of albums by female opera singers,” writes Charles Michener. “The majority of them, as it happens, are not sopranos but mezzo-sopranos; we’re living in an age when, curiously, many of the most interesting female voices belong not to the leading ladies who impersonate the tragic heroines around which most operatic plots creak, but to a powerful group of slightly lower-voiced women who rival, and frequently outstrip, the prima donnas for vocal charisma.”
The WTC Tower Compromise
Later this week, the compromise design of the tower at the World Trade Center by Daniel Libeskind and David Childs is to be released. “As details of that compromise were uncovered, in interviews conducted over the last week, it appeared that except for a few elements, the tower will closely resemble a design forged initially by architects at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, house architects for Ground Zero leaseholder Larry Silverstein, in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. That was long before Ground Zero master planner Daniel Libeskind was involved in the redevelopment process.”
Man (Alias “The Monkey”) Arrested In Van Gogh Threat
A Dutch thief known as “the Monkey” has been arrested inconnection with the theft of two Van Gogh paintings from Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum in 2002. “Investigators were baffled by the theft at the time because guards patrolled the premises at night and there was tight security inside, including infra-red systems and cameras. The thieves got in through the roof and police found a rope and a 4.5-metre (15-foot) ladder leaning against the rear of the building.”
Barnes & Noble’s Fiction Gatekeeper
Sessalee Hensley is in charge of buying fiction for Barnes & Noble. “How many copies will be bought – of Proust, McMillan, John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and Ms. Hensley’s favorite, Barbara Kingsolver – how they’ll be apportioned among the 652 Barnes & Noble branches and 200 B. Dalton Booksellers in her fiefdom, how they’ll be placed and positioned–this is all part of the gig. ‘There are some books that I’ve gone through three, four, five revisions of how I’m thinking about them,’ says Ms. Hensley, 48. Concern that she’s decided wrong sometimes keeps her up at night. Concern that she’s decided wrong keeps publishers up as well…”