JM Coetzee is the kind of author you can feel good about being enthusiastic, writes Lynne Coady. “This is an author whose work one can celebrate unreservedly, who refuses to be anyone’s public platypus, whose recent winning of the Nobel Prize for literature is the kind of thing that makes readers feel really, really good about whoever’s keeping shop over there in Stockholm, and really, really contemptuous toward the Man Booker Prize judges, who neglected to shortlist Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.”
Blog
Maryinsky Theatre Warehouse Damage More Extensive Than Reported
A September fire at the Maryinsky Theatre’s warehouse in St. Petersburg, Russia was said to have caused only $225,000 damage. But the cost is evidently much higher. Some 30 productions were affected by the fire, and it will take about $15 million to replace what was damaged. The company’s 2003-04 season are imperiled as well as tours to Germany, Japan and the United States.
Power(Point) To The People!
Former Talking Heads musician David Byrne has turned to PowerPoint as his latest artistic medium. “His art presentations make babble of business-speak, and question whether the form of what we communicate can affect its truth: Rebellious flow charts stream backward, screens overflow with clip art gone wild, deliverables and leave-behinds assume surreal new roles, and renegade bullet points assault the viewer in a rapid-fire barrage.”
Buena Vista Star Gonzalez, 84
“The Cuban pianist Ruben Gonzalez, one of the leading members of the musicians that formed the Buena Vista Social Club, has died aged 84.”
Iraq Symphony In DC
The Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra arrives in Washington DC to perform at the Kennedy Center. “Our objective is not (just) to come here and play music, but to play music through our point of view and the way we understand it.”
Steve Jobs: Recording Companies Need To Be Educated
How did Apple get recording companies to buy in to the iTunes download store? “We told them the music subscription services they were pushing were going to fail. MusicNet was gonna fail, Pressplay was gonna fail. Here’s why: People don’t want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45s, then they bought LPs, they bought cassettes, they bought 8-tracks, then they bought CDs. They’re going to want to buy downloads. They didn’t see it that way. There were people running around — business-development people — who kept pointing to AOL as the great model for this and saying, ‘No, we want that — we want a subscription business’.”
Australia’s $39 Million To The Visual Arts
Australia’s various levels of government have united to pump an additional $39 million in funding to the visual arts. The money is the direct result of a Federal Government-initiated inquiry. In a joint announcement the governments said they would allocate the funds to support infrastructure, including giving more money to 40 arts and crafts organisations, expand the market through more art fairs and touring, give more grants to individual artists and provide more support for indigenous art.”
Death Of Theatre Criticism?
Theatre criticism is dying, writes Bill Marx. But why? “The fact is most of today’s critics have no interest in ideas: they are functionaries who treat reviewing as diplomacy rather than provocation. Once criticism becomes a job, rather than an act of passionate thought, timidity inevitably follows. ‘The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction,’ proclaims poet William Blake. The consumer guide critics are winning; the horses that provide context are going to the glue factory on their knees. And a tear or two should be shed. But do not despair, because in the future the tygers of wrath will growl and a mad dog or two bark.”
Criticism Of Disney’s Eisner Growing
Is Michael Eisner vulnerable as head of Disney? After Roy Disney quit Disney’s board last week, more public criticism of Eisner has surfaced. “Despite a charm offensive by Mr. Eisner in response to the board uprising last year – wooing anxious or skeptical directors, institutional investors, partners and members of the news media over cocktails and in interviews – many say he has just papered over a lack of substantive change at the company.”
The Changing Balanchine
“Once upon a time it was easy to defend the orthodoxy of the Balanchine style in practice. It was on stage with the master’s imprimatur at the New York State Theatre. Things are not that simple anymore. Suddenly, Balanchine is everywhere. And his dances simply don’t look the same on Martins’ New York City Ballet, Tomasson’s San Francisco Ballet, Mitchell’s Dancer Theatre of Harlem, the Suzanne Farrell Ballet or in Villella’s own Miami City Ballet.”