“The Washington skyline is due for an exhilarating lift in three years or so, when a spectacular memorial honoring men and women of the U.S. Air Force rises on a hill just west of the Pentagon. Unveiled yesterday, the memorial design by architect James Ingo Freed appropriately is a soaring thing, an airy triumvirate of stainless steel pylons ascending in gentle arcs into the Virginia sky. The highest of the spires will ascend 270 feet above a granite-paved plateau on a promontory overlooking the Pentagon and monumental Washington. A second arc comes in at 230 feet, and the third tops off at just above 200.”
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Long Lines And Crushing Crowds – Welcome To The Art Museum!
A heavily promoted ‘blockbuster’ exhibit of the work of Degas at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is drawing huge numbers of visitors, and that may be a problem. “On those most popular days for museum attendance, Degas devotees holding timed tickets have reported waits of up to an hour to see the critically lauded show, devoted to the great impressionist painter’s lyric images of ballet dancers. And once inside, it was tough for the packed-in art lovers to see the art.” Part of the crowd-control problem can be attributed to a series of crippling snowstorms in the area which prevented many ticketholders from making it to the museum during the exhibit’s first two weekends.
Everybody Loves Salon. So Why Is It Broke?
Salon.com is one of the original online publishing success stories. It has high-profile writers, scads of devoted readers, and a surfeit of great story ideas. So why is it constantly on the verge of going out of business? “The company ended its first quarter of 2003 with only $169,000 in cash. It stopped paying rent for its swanky San Francisco headquarters in December, and the landlord was demanding $200,000 immediately.” The problem may just be that the world that Salon created – where two-way communication supercedes the ‘old media’ model of “I write, you read” – has become so diverse and successful that Salon itself no longer has much of a core purpose.
Wasn’t Anyone Paying Attention?
Last year, Minneapolis unveiled plans for a dramatic new downtown library designed by architect Cesar Pelli. The city then moved all the books and staff out of the current library into a temporary facility, and started demolishing the old building to make way for the new one. And then, someone pointed out that the city has no money to be building libraries. Columnist Doug Grow feels that there is something just slightly wrong with that sequence of events.
CBS Expands Tony Coverage
For years, the Tony Awards, which honor the best of Broadway, have been the awards show nobody wanted. CBS has aired the show for a quarter-century, but only the last two hours of it, allowing PBS to air the first hour for the last five years or so. In fact, earlier this year, there were rumbles that CBS might drop the telecast altogether. But now, CBS has picked up its option to air all three hours of the Tonys, shutting a stunend PBS out of the process entirely. So what suddenly made the Tonys a desirable commodity? Couldn’t have anything to do with this year’s unexpected blockbuster of a Grammy Awards show, could it? Nah…
Houston Symphony Continues Sniping
The musicians and management of the Houston Symphony continue to take swipes at each other in a bitter contract dispute. A recent editorial in the Houston Chronicle called for management to withdraw its deadline for musicians to accept its ‘last, best’ contract offer, and continue to negotiate, but symphony management insists that the orchestra could run out of money by May if it continues to bargain indefinitely. Meanwhile, the musicians are convinced that the orchestra’s problems are due to gross mismanagement, and charge that the current executive team is determined “to destroy or, at the very least, downsize the orchestra to something they can financially handle but which would not by any definition be a world-class orchestra.”
Just Blow The Damn Thing Up
“The cumulative force of years of negative posturing, while successful in increasing musicians’ pay scales, in my opinion has weakened the Symphony’s prospects and credibility.” So speaks Roy Nolen, a former Houston Symphony board member who says that the orchestra’s problems do not stem from a lack of management competence, but from the inability of the musicians to accept the reality that the residents of the nation’s fourth-largest city simply do not care about orchestral music. “It may be time for the Houston Symphony Society to consider whether a single-city symphony orchestra of high quality is viable in Houston.”
Arts Policy Coming To Calgary?
Calgary is a beautiful city, but these days, it is hardly thought of as an artistic and cultural beacon. In the last year, the city’s orchestra nearly folded, and the city council nearly refused to assist in its rescue. But a new proposal would see the Cowboy City adopt an official ‘arts policy’ which would commit Calgary to supporting, i real and substantive ways, its own cultural future. “If council approves the recommendation, it will develop a new civic arts policy by April 2004 that will include setting aside a portion of city infrastructure spending specifically for the arts.”
Music & Murder: The Life and Death of a Canadian Composer
Twenty years ago this week, French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier was murdered in Paris by a teenage prostitute. “His grisly demise was the mirror opposite of his music, which often sparkles with a delicate and loving grandeur. And it endures. Most of his 48 completed pieces have been recorded… His output heightened Canada’s international stature more than any other composer’s. Dangerous living fuelled his inspiration, helping polish salacious experience into a diamond in sound. Yet it also proved his undoing.”
An American in London
The British people have spoken, and they have declared that the author who best exemplifies an understanding of and love for the U.K. is none other than travel author and novelist Bill Bryson. Bryson’s Notes From A Small Island was chosen as the ‘book that best represents England’ in a poll organized for World Book Day, and it beat out Orwell’s 1984, among other classic British books. Of course, Bryson is from Des Moines, Iowa…