Scotland’s culture minister has unveiled his government’s new arts policy, and has ruled out a bailout of the troubled Scottish Opera. “Last month, senior figures in the arts warned that without a substantial cash injection, national companies – notably Scottish Opera – and some theatres might have to cut the number of productions this autumn.”
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Kids’ Books – Into A Sea Of Difficulty
The odds against the author of a kids’ book are enormous. “Those of us who review children’s books jettison books we dislike, unwilling to waste time and limited space on squashing reviews because we know that it’s our recommendations that are most useful. Information about children’s books – genuine, independent, informed and balanced – is hard to find. The job of children’s bookseller may not feature in many careers advisers’ files, but it’s one that benefits from a vast panoply of skills – interpersonal to intellectual – that create the right environment for perfect retailing: a successful sale is of a product that won’t come back to a customer who will.”
Harry Publisher Sues Newspapers – 1st Amendment Be Damned
Harry Potter author JK Rowling and her publisher are suing the New York Daily News for $100 million for printing details of the new Harry Potter story before it hits stores. Simon Houpt writes that other media outlets have been intimidated into not publishing plot details, and then Houpt throws in some plot details of his own to illustrate. Is it not a first amendment issue, he asks?
Toon Town: Is Superman The New Apollo?
Cartoons are more and more showing up in “serious” art. ” ‘Making art from cartoon figures today ‘is like painting a Madonna in the Renaissance’. With cultural literacy at a low ebb, a riff on Superman communicates more universally than Bible stories, mythology, or fairy tales. Archie and Veronica have become our Aries and Venus.”
A Small-Town Museum Grows Almost As Large As Boston’s MFA
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem Massachusetts has a new home designed by Moshe Safdie, writes Robert Campbell, and it’s a winner. The old museum “was a hodgepodge of buildings and additions that accreted over more than a century and a half. With the new addition – and the dozen or more historic houses in Salem owned by the museum – PEM now has, according to its director, Dan Monroe, 88 percent as much floor area as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. A local provincial museum has morphed into a potential national icon. It’s not easy to fit so big a museum into the modest surroundings of historic Salem. On the whole, Safdie pulls it off.
Potter – Underneath The Hype, Something Truly Worth Celebrating
The clamor over the Harry Potter books may be a little (ok, a lot) over the top. But Norman Lebrecht says that it’s important to celebrate a publishing phenomenon that flies in the face of what the conventional wisdom about books – and children’s books particularly – insisted was true. “While it is futile to predict the thought processes that will prevail a century hence, when books may have been supplanted by chips and authors by robotic processors, one certainty can be safely asserted. A hundred years from now, millions of people will still be reading Charles Dickens, and they will still be reading Harry Potter, the written word triumphant.”
Penumbra Theatre To Ordway?
St. Paul, Minnesota’s Penumbra Theatre is one America’s leading African American theatres. And it’s been looking to build itself a real home for some time. Now it looks like the theatre might abandon those plans and move into the Ordway Performing Arts Center. “A potential collaboration between the Ordway and Penumbra provides a possible: Penumbra would provide cachet, a density of activity and, most probably, rental income to the Ordway.
Linda Lovelace, The Musical
A musical about porn star Linda Lovelace is being workshopped in Los Angeles. Producers hope to stage a full production in LA or New York. “It’s the idea of finding ourselves in a bad situation and surviving that audiences will relate to.”
Senate Committee Votes To Overturn FCC
The Senate Commerce Committee votes to overturn parts of a Federal Communications Commission decision freeing media companies from decades-old ownership limits and allowing them to buy more outlets and merge in new ways. The proposal would “roll back changes that allowed individual companies to own television stations reaching nearly half the nation’s viewers and combinations of newspapers and broadcast stations in the same city. The Republican-controlled FCC relaxed those rules on June 2 with a 3-2 party-line vote.”
FCC Overturn Is Victory For America
The Senate Commerce Committee’s overturning of new FCC media ownership rules might not hold up in the full Senate. So what does the committee vote mean? “It is no overstatement to say that the committee’s vote was a victory, or at least a step on the road to victory, for the American people. To put it another way: If Frank Capra’s idealistic Sen. Jefferson Smith, from the film ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’ really existed, he would be jumping for joy right now.”