“Books for younger children about gay relationships are rare. A recent book “Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin” has caused a big debate in England. “Is homosexuality such a tricky subject for parents that they must tactfully broach it through books? I doubt it. I remember my older son asking when he was eight or nine, unprompted by any book, whether love could exist between people of the same sex. And when I said it could, he was curious, unjudgmental. Unlike adults, children accept the world as they find it.”
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New Harry To Get 6.8 Million First Printing
At more than 1000 pages, the new Harry Potter – due to hit stores in June – is already big. And it sports a big price too – $29 for a children’s book. The first print run will also be huge – 6.8 million copies are being printed. “J.K. Rowling’s previous Potter novel, ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,’ came out in July 2000 with a first printing of 3.8 million. It sold out within 48 hours and now has over l6 million copies in print.”
Melbourne Museum Proposes Free Admission
The Melbourne Museum is asking the state government to eliminate the museum’s admission fee. “The museum raises $10 million a year from admission fees but visitor numbers have consistently fallen below expectations. The museum faces a $6 million deficit by June 2004, if nothing is done, despite a management shake-up in December when three senior executives lost their jobs.” Museum officials believe if the museum is free it will attract more visitors and customers to the cafes and gift shops.
Chicago Art Institute Shrinks Plans
The Chicago Art Institute is shrinking its plans for an addition designed by Renzo Piano. “When museum officials announced plans for the wing in 2001, they envisioned a five-level structure of about 290,000 square feet, with 75,000 square feet of galleries. But the latest plans, approved Monday, foresee a slimmed-down structure of 220,000 square feet, with 60,000 square feet of galleries. Museum officials said they have raised $100 million. The project’s construction cost is now placed at $198 million.”
Economy Cuts Into Manhattan Arts
In New York, a down economy and cuts in arts funding are starting to make a visible impact on the city’s arts institutions. “Museums, theaters, concert halls, opera companies, public gardens and zoos throughout the five boroughs are cutting performances, exhibitions, days of operation and staff members. This is only the beginning, arts executives say. ‘It’s like a patient whose health is slipping. The strong will reduce what they do and the weak will have to take more drastic measures’.”
Hitler Film Too Hot For Berlin Film Fest
The film “Max,” which portrays Adolph Hitler as a struggling artist in Munich after the First World War has been controversial in Europe. “Hundreds of films are being shown at this week’s Berlin Film Festival, but Max was rejected, despite that fact that it has been hailed as a brave, thought-provoking picture with one of the sharpest scripts and some of the best acting you are likely to see this year.”
Channel Crossing – Sport Of 19th Century Artists
British and French artists of the 19th Century competed with one another, collaborated and spurred one another on – indeed, there was much to-ing and fro-ing. “The artistic and literary relationship between France and Britain – which also included a French fascination and infatuation with Walter Scott, and with Shakespearian themes – was much more a matter of give and take than, say, the British artistic love affair with New York between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s, in which British art played a largely subservient role.”
Martha Graham Reborn (After A Very Very Long Time)
The Martha Graham Company is back. But it’s been away long before the legal dispute that shut the doors. “In fact, this famous troupe, the oldest dance company in America, had been in trouble long before [heir Ron] Protas took over. Graham, who was born in 1894, choreographed for sixty-five years, but she was in top form for only the first half of that run. In the nineteen-fifties she slipped into despair and alcoholism. Eventually, she stopped going to the studio. The dancers ran the company. Later she dried out, and came back, but on the arm of Protas, whom many of the dancers and staff found impossible to work with. Some quit; others were fired. Year by year, the company consisted of increasingly young people facing, without the old-timers’ guidance, increasingly serious problems: debt, dissension, cold reviews, defecting funders.”
Of Power Laws And The 80/20 Rules
Weblogs have been touted as the loosing of democratic speech – anyone can publish, anyone can read. But as there are more weblogs, natural powerlaws are kicking in and predictably some blogs are rising above the rest. “For much of the last century, investigators have been finding power law distributions in human systems. The economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that wealth follows a ‘predictable imbalance’, with 20% of the population holding 80% of the wealth. The linguist George Zipf observed that word frequency falls in a power law pattern, with a small number of high frequency words (I, of, the), a moderate number of common words (book, cat cup), and a huge number of low frequency words (peripatetic, hypognathous).” Thus too, it appears with the success of weblogs…
Network Solutions…
“How does individual behavior aggregate to collective behavior? As simply as it can be asked, this is one of the most fundamental and pervasive questions in all of science. A human brain, for example, is in one sense a trillion neurons connected in a big electrochemical lump. But to each of us who has one, a brain is clearly much more, exhibiting properties like consciousness, memory, and personality, whose nature cannot be explained simply in terms of aggregations of neurons. What makes the problem hard, and what makes complex systems complex, is that the parts making up the whole don’t sum up in any simple fashion. Rather, they interact with each other, and in interacting, even quite simple components can generate bewildering behavior.”