Teachers at Australia’s universities have gone on strike. “Classes were cancelled and libraries closed as staff picketed outside universities to protest against government moves to link higher education funding to industrial conditions.”
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Sony Pictures To Lay Off 300
Sony Pictures plans to lay off 300 workers in the next year and a half. “The layoffs will follow the elimination of 1,000 jobs in the entertainment and electronics giant’s struggling music group earlier this year. The new cuts are expected to hit across the board at Sony Pictures’ key business units, including its Culver City-based Columbia Pictures movie studio, domestic and international television operations and Sony Pictures Digital. Sources estimate that the cuts could save the company as much as $75 million a year.”
Foxy Plan For Oakland Arts School
“The Oakland City Council is considering spending $13 million to renovate the long-shuttered Fox Theater downtown, with $5.5 million of the public money helping fund a new home for Mayor Jerry Brown’s arts charter school.”
Seattle Symphony Hires Controversial New Exec Director
The Seattle Symphony hires a new executive director. Paul Meecham is currently orchestra manager of the New York Philharmonic, but his appointment in Seattle is controversial, and didn’t win the full support of the orchestra’s board of directors. “According to musicians, Meecham had earlier made derogatory statements about longtime music director Gerard Schwarz’s conducting and recordings in a meeting with several musicians.”
National Book Award Finalists
This year’s National Book Awards finalists have been named. They are: Shirley Hazzard’s “Great Fire,” Marianne Wiggins’s “Evidence of Things Unseen” (Simon & Schuster), “The Known World,” by Edward P. Jones, “A Ship Made of Paper,” by Scott Spencer, and “Drop City,” by T. C. Boyle.
In His Own Words – Booker Winner On His Colorful Past:
DBC Pierre knows what it’s like to experience “90 flavours of trouble riding on his ass,” having been addicted to cocaine and run up such huge debts that he ripped off a friend to the tune of £30,000. Winning the most prestigious literary award in the country worth £50,000 will not counter the lesson of Pierre’s past 20 years: that life is “a hard bastard” and “we should count ourselves lucky for just about everything, including drawing breath.”
So Who Is DBC Pierre?
“It was in 1999 or so that, eking out a living as a cartoonist and graphic designer, he suddenly felt compelled to write. The catalyst was a pre-Columbine American television report about a teenage boy arrested for shooting several schoolmates.”
Ann Godoff’s New Crop
Ann Godoff, who was fired from Random House last year, is out with her first set of books at new employer Penguin. “The first sign that the Penguin Press is not your run-of-the-mill commercial publisher is the plain-brown-paper catalog cover. Inside, each of the 14 books gets a two-page spread, as opposed to the one-page announcement that many catalogs give most books. Each book cover is shown in black and white (surely, in the flesh, there’ll be some color) and otherwise illustrated with sepia photo strips. Nothing flashy here. The message seems to be: ‘We’re Old World—smart and subdued.’ Penguin Press is the publishing equivalent of shabby chic.
NY Phil/Carnegie Merger – An Ill-Fated Venture
The New York Philharmonic/Carnegie Hall merger was ill-fated from the start, writes Charles Michener. “It was never going to happen. As we now know, the whole farrago was cooked up by Sanford I. Weill, the megabanker who heads Carnegie’s board, and his counterpart at the Philharmonic, Paul B. Guenther. And for all the spin about the orchestra’s glorious return to the place where it flourished before its move to Lincoln Center in 1962, it seems clear that the scheme had nothing to do with nostalgia or concern for the public good. In keeping with the merger mania that has corrupted so much of the product delivered by our media and entertainment leviathans (General Electric, which owns NBC, has just added Vivendi Universal’s entertainment division to its list of household appliances), the deal was all about the bottom line.”
Resurrecting Sammy
Two new biographies of Sammy Davis Jr. “spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish – indeed his lifelong effort – to be white.”