Last week, trying to deflect reports of looting of the Iraq National Museum, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared: “The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over. And it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase. And you see it 20 times. And you think, my goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?”
Blog
Facing The Blues – Saddam’s Picture-Makers Out Of Work
Iraq’s official portraitists are out of work. “In a good year, 20 portraits of Saddam Hussein could earn an artist £1,200 – a small fortune in a country crippled by two decades of war and economic sanctions. But now that the best-paying customer in town is fresh out of commissions, his absence is leading to a plummeting market in presidential iconography; what is a Saddam portraitist to do?”
Is Vaclav Havel The New George Orwell?
“Vaclav Havel, the 66-year-old former Czech president who was term-limited out of office on February 2, built his reputation in the 1970s by being to eyewitness fact what George Orwell was to dystopian fiction. In other words, he used common sense to deconstruct rhetorical falsehoods, pulling apart the suffocating mesh of collectivist lies one carefully observed thread at a time. Like Orwell, Havel was a fiction writer whose engagement with the world led him to master the nonfiction political essay.”
Inside Hitler’s Bookcases
Hitler was a major bibliophile. He had an enormous collection. “By 1930, as sales of Mein Kampf bolstered his income, book buying represented his third largest tax deduction (after general travel and transportation): 1,692 marks in 1930, with similar deductions in the two years following. More telling still is the five-year insurance policy Hitler took out in October of 1934, with the Gladbacher Fire Insurance Company, on his six-room apartment on the Prinzregentenplatz, in downtown Munich. In the letter of agreement accompanying the policy Hitler valued his book collection, said to consist of 6,000 volumes, at 150,000 marks—half the value of the entire policy. The other half represented his art holdings.”
Their Favorite Classical Music
What music do 250,000 listeners of Classic FM radio in the UK most like? According to a new poll, it helps if the music has been featured in an ad or movie. “Pieces of music made famous by advertisements made up most of the contemporary music featured on the list. The work in first place for the third year running, Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto in C minor, also has a connection to films.” Rocketing high on this list was a newcomer – the score to the movie “Lord of the Rings.”
Barenboim’s Reduced (Hah!) Schedule
Pianist/conductor Daniel Barenboim says he’s cutting back his schedule. But “the Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director’s idea of cutting back in his 61st year (he turned 60 last November) might still seem exhausting to a mere mortal. He’s just completing his annual Festtage (Festival Days) in Berlin, which included two performances each at his own opera house of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” and Verdi’s “La Traviata,” an opera he had never conducted before, as well as three performances by the CSO at the world-renowned Philharmonie, the home of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, of six heavy-duty works by Mahler and Bruckner.”
Florida Philharmonic Down To Its Last Dollars
The Florida Philharmonic, said to be carrying a $3 million debt, is declaring an emergency and asking community leaders to help. “Based on what is known today, the FPO is projected to run out of operating cash in early May.”
The Land That Bought Jazz
It’s the 200th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase. “But if the political and geographical implications of the land deal have been copiously documented, the cultural implications of the Louisiana Purchase have yet to be fully decoded. For although jazz is universally deemed a distinctly American musical idiom, in fact it was the confluence of European, African and Caribbean cultures in parts of the Louisiana Territory – especially New Orleans – that gave rise to the radical new sounds. The intermingling of cultures that produced a new American music would not have happened, however, without an explicitly political act – the American purchase of the Louisiana Territory.”
The Ambivalent Flag Waver?
“In the past two years – as flying the flag on homes, public buildings, opera houses and (momentarily) central Baghdad has become an American enthusiasm – Johns has emerged as the last hope, or maybe the fig leaf, of the ambivalent flag-waver. When a video of the concert for New York after the World Trade Centre attacks was released in this country, Johns’s Flag was on the cover. When New York museums wanted to match the patriotic mood, they displayed not just any flag, but Johns’s flag: Three Flags (1958), a version owned by the Whitney. Ambivalence is his thing. There are few works of art quite so uncertain, so confounding – not just in its values and meaning, but even in its status as an object or a sign – as Jasper Johns’s Flag, made in its most famous version in 1954-55.”
AntiWar Books Selling Well In US
Perhaps surprisingly, given Americans’ high support in the polls for war, books skeptical of America’s current state of politics, are doing well on the bestseller lists. “The books are comfortably outselling titles which might seem at first to better reflect the zeitgeist, such as Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism and similar.”