“Chandanagore is the capital of Indian illuminations. The small town employs up to 12,000 people, who work nine months of the year creating extravagant shows for major festivals. Sridhar Das is the town’s most renowned light artist. In the past few years, he has made waterfalls, monkey gods, dragons spewing fire, the triumph of good over evil, portraits of Nobel prizewinners, political statements, environmental messages, even pontifications by politicians. His workshops are a cross between a foundry and a tapestry studio.”
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Old Cuba In Danger
Cuba is after the tourist trade. “Tourists have come: two million visitors are expected in Havana this year. However, the special city they have come to see is in danger of vanishing – not simply because of age, humidity, termites and general lack of maintenance. The word in Havana is that when the president, Fidel Castro, dies and the US finally lifts its longstanding economic embargo, Havana will be transformed, and not necessarily for the better.”
Has New York Lost Its Ability To Build Great Buildings?
New York has lost its reputation as a place that great architecture can be built. “Between about 1890 and 1960, New York was an architectural powerhouse, a laboratory for architects who couldn’t dream of achieving anything on that kind of scale anywhere else. From early Gothic skyscrapers like the Woolworth Building (1913) through the Art Deco of the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings (1930 and 1931) up to the Seagram Building (1958) and the smooth corporate Modernism of Fifth Avenue, architects who wanted to build big looked to New York. But… it is extraordinary that in the world’s greatest and richest city, almost nothing (excepting a few good retail interiors) of international significance or interest has been built in New York since the appearance of unfortunate postmodern skyscrapers at the end of 1970s.”
Universal Price Cut – Just Desperation
Universal’s decision to cut prices by 30 percent is a blockbuster. “It’s a historic move – the first time prices have been trimmed across the board by a major label in the 20-year history of the CD – but it comes at a time when the music industry as we know it is fast becoming history.” The price cut is too little too late.
Sibelius Songs Found
The scores for four long lost songs by Jan Sibelius have been found. “Although the existence of the scores was known, it was thought they were lost because there was no record of their whereabouts.”
Nazi-Loot Website Goes Online
A new website designed to track down art looted by the Nazis goes online. “So far 66 museums have given details of their collection to the site, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Chicago’s Institute of Art. The Nazis were thought to have looted more than 1.5 million pieces of art. More than 100,000 items of museum quality are still missing, and some of them are said to have made their way to the US.”
Recording Industry Files Lawsuits Against File-Traders
The recording industry began filing lawsuits against file-traders. Monday 261 suits were filed. “On average, the music traders had made over 1,000 music files available to others on P2P networks like Kazaa. The most egregious offender sued had shared over 3,000 files.”
A File-Trading Amnesty You Should Resist
“Should you take the RIAA up on its amnesty offer? Maybe not. The “Clean Slate” program promises that the RIAA won’t pursue legal action against P2P pirates who send in a notarized affidavit declaring that they’ve wiped all copyright-infringing materials from their disk drives and who vow not to file-share again. But lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco say there are multiple reasons to sit tight for now, rather than rush to sign and deliver what amounts to an admission of guilt.”
The Real Bach. Really. No, We Mean it
“We’ve seen more releases of Mozart, Beethoven, and beyond with original instruments. In the process we hear scholarship go right and we hear it go wrong. Sometimes, we hear it go nuts. After all, research can take us only so far. We can’t really know what music sounded like before recordings arrived, and the historical data is vague and contradictory. The older the music, the more uncertainty.”
Joan Didion And The Cult Of Personality
Since the publication of The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion has been celebrated as one of America’s leading practitioners of a new kind of highly wrought personal journalism. In the New York Observer, Susan Faludi claimed that Didion taught a generation of writers how to make journalism “a personal expression.” And Martin Amis characterized her style as “self-revealing” in an essay in which he went on to call her “a human being who managed to gauge another book out of herself rather than a writer who gets her living done on the side.” But has her writing ever been that immediate, that personal, that raw? Has her confessional style ever been much more than just that—a style?”