“The poet Josephine Jacobsen, who died last week in Maryland at age 94, was a cultural exception. Although she never attended college, she earned the respect of her fellow writers and was named poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (the honorary job now called United States poet laureate) in 1971. She did not gain widespread recognition until her 60’s, although her collected poems, In the Crevice of Time, and selected prose, The Instant of Knowing, which appeared when she was an octogenarian, are still in print and winning new readers at a vigorous clip.”
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Subliminal No More: Product Placement Prepares To Attack
NBC’s newest entry in the Reality TV sweepstakes is called The Restaurant, and it chronicles the inner workings of an actual Manhattan eatery, from the chef to the busboys to the customers. The network wasn’t wild about the concept initially, but when the show’s creator pitched it to ad execs, he found more support than he ever could have dreamed of. “Product placement is hardly a new phenomenon on TV — think Coca-Cola’s imprint on Fox’s American Idol — but Restaurant represents what could be a new breed of TV program built around marketing messages.”
Harry Potter And The Academic Obsession
No, you can’t major in Harry Potter. Not yet, anyway. But JK Rowling’s boy wizard is becoming a figure of increasing interest to academics and intellectuals who are spending hours at prestigious conferences deconstructing the world of Hogwarts and matching it up with minutiae from the history of various real-world intellectual movements. “A bit enthusiastic, perhaps, but such outsize claims may spring from insecurity. After all, no less a figure than Harold Bloom has derided Ms. Rowling’s writing as ‘goo,’ while William Safire… scornfully (though presciently) predicted that ‘scholarly tomes will be written about the underlying motifs of the Potter series,’ despite its being largely ‘a waste of adult time.'”
Concerto For Imagination
The world probably isn’t in desperate need of a bunch of new kinds of musical instrument, but sometimes necessity is the enemy of invention, and the participants in a Massachusetts residency sponsored by the Bang On A Can folks aren’t letting a lack of public clamor for their work discourage them. Among the new instruments now on display at Mass MOCA is the whirlycopter, which looks like “a cross between a helicopter and an electric chair,” yet sounds “like an Orthodox choir, chanting somewhere over in the next valley.” The idea, of course, is to make new music more accessible and, dare we say it, fun, as well as to free up the musical imaginations of the participants.
Playing Fast And Loose With Ticket Prices
Theatre tickets are starting to resemble airfares, and not just because they’re ridiculously expensive. Generally, when we go to the theatre, we expect to have paid the same price as the people on either side of us, but increasingly, Broadway producers are charging less for ticketbuyers willing and able to make their purchases well in advance, and even less for folks willing to be flexible about where they sit, and what date they attend the show. “For complete control — the ability to choose your seat and the date you sit there — you will probably pay top dollar. In most other cases, you can make a deal.”
The Woman Who Knows How To Rebuild Iraq
When the U.S. government needed a blueprint for rebuilding Japan after World War II, they looked not within the American military-industrial complex, but to a cultural anthropologist named Ruth Benedict. “The choice to rely so heavily on cultural anthropologists in the rebuilding of a defeated enemy has particular resonance now as the United States struggles to rebuild a stable and viable Iraq, a country that, like Japan, is seen as both impossibly foreign and forbidding.” The idea of rebuilding a foreign nation without a deep and abiding knowledge of and respect for its culture seems risky at best, but there seem to be few Ruth Benedicts around to help with the current mess in Iraq. Or, perhaps more accurately, if they do exist, no one’s asking for their help.
Chronicling the Art of the New Persuaders
They’re often annoying, they’re frequently invasive, they’re more than occasionally misleading, and almost no one admits to liking them. But ads have come to define modern culture, and while it may be a stretch to brand naked salesmanship as art, it’s difficult to overlook a phenomenon that causes millions of people to watch a specific football game in which they have little interest, just to see how Pepsi will be trying to get us to buy their product this year. A new 3-volume encyclopedia sets out to chronicle the history and uncover the cultural meaning of the advertising explosion of the last century.
Affirmative Action Needed At The Justice League?
Comic books are a booming business, and despite technological and marketing advances in the decades since the genre first burst upon the scene, superhero stories are much the same as they ever were. Good battles evil, and good wins nine times out of ten. Brooding crusaders in masks and (let’s face it) ridiculously inconvenient capes swoop about densely populated cities like flying cat burglars, and no one but the bad guys ever takes a shot at them. And after countless battles, endless fistfights, and millions upon millions of horrible puns, nearly all the heroes are still white, and most of the women are, to but it bluntly, ridiculously top-heavy. Will comic books ever get with the times?
Glimmer Of Hope In San Antonio
Mike Greenberg isn’t predicting a rebirth for the bankrupt San Antonio Symphony just yet, but he’s encouraged by the involvement of the city’s mayor, and the work of a new task force charged with developing new strategies for orchestral success in South Texas. “In 1994, a similar task force… worked for several months and produced a report that said essentially nothing of value. The 1994 report set cost and revenue goals, most of which the symphony achieved in the short term, but failed to address the fundamentals of the orchestra’s program and its relationship with the larger community. The current task force, it seems, intends to avoid that mistake.”
Gatenby Exit Prompts Resignations, Festival Boycott
“At least one international author will not be coming to Harbourfront’s International Festival of Authors this fall as a direct result of the recent resignation of Greg Gatenby as the festival’s artistic director and the Harbourfront Reading Series. Argentinian-born author Alberto Manguel, who now lives in France, said in an interview he faxed a letter on Tuesday or Wednesday to Harbourfront officials saying his participation is off because Gatenby is no longer involved. Manguel’s decision follows the resignations of five festival board members, including three high-profile Canadian authors.”