The way it works is this – people get paid by publishing houses to sort through the crap and figure out which book ideas are good and which aren’t. Paid real money. To have judgment. Make informed choices. And then, books like these always seem to end up in print… What were they thinking?
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Year Of The Blues
The US Congress has declared 2003 the “Year of the Blues.” “If hip-hop is ‘the black CNN,’ as Chuck D. famously suggested, blues music was a running news bulletin from the earliest days of radio. The blues, as the Congress noted, have documented the Great Depression, ‘race relations, pop culture and the migration of the United States from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrialized nation’.”
Crusading For Classics
Harold Bloom has written another book crusading for literature’s days of yore. “The reason he sells books in their tens of thousands is that he has set himself against the tendency of universities to talk in relativist terms about literature, to promote cultural studies and to analyse books as part of a progressivist political project. Bloom loathes all this and in the past few years has done everything he can to reclaim the classics of literature for the general reader. This has involved a paradoxical restatement of the need for tradition and literary evaluation.”
Quotable – A Way Of Seeing The World
Why try to quote others? “Quotations are part of the fabric of conversation. We all repeat lines from our friends and family, passing on what Jane said to Tom, or retelling a joke we heard in a pub. Throwing Arthur Miller, or Nick Cave, into the mix is a way of including these people in our circle of intimacy, a way of paying homage to the works we love. Some argue that art works in a similar way, as an endless series of quotations and mis-quotations. Absorbed by a kind of cultural osmosis, they become the markers of our social and generational milieu.”
New York Kills Film Studio Plan
A proposed movie studio complex, to be built in New York’s Staten Island, has been been killed. “A year after then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani gave Aiello’s firm, Stapleton Studios, a permit to build on the old Staten Island Homeport, the deal has collapsed amid charges of incompetence and fraud. The city evicted the studio owners; the group refused to go and is suing.”
The Year In Arts
The top arts stories of 2002? ArtsJournal editor Douglas McLennan writes in the London Evening Standard that money seemed to be the theme flowing through more than its share of arts stories this year.
Movieplexes Bulged With People In 2002
More people went to the movies this year in the US than any year since 1959. “By some estimates, admissions could climb more than 10% over last year’s record levels, with folks flocking to theaters more than 1.5 billion times.” Why? Paricularly with all the competition for the entertainment dollar from DVD’s TV etc….? “The real world is probably more terrifying than Americans have ever known. It’s the same kind of desire for escape we also saw during the Depression in the ’30s.”
Grandson Sues to Get Looted Picasso Back
A 1922 Picasso painting valued at $10 million is under dispute in the US – the grandson of the woman who had owned the painting before the Nazis stole it in World War II is suing the Illinois woman whose family bought the painting and is now trying to sell it.
Why The LA County Museum Put On The Brakes
How did the LA County Museum of Art go from huge enthusiasm for an exciting $200 million project to rebuild proposed by Rem Koolhaas, to shelving the project indefinitely? M-O-N-E-Y.
Investigating LA’s Film Agency
Did the director of the agency set up to facilitate filming projects in Los Angeles “defraud the city and county by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for personal expenses and political donations, some to members of the board that oversees the agency?” That’s what an investigation of the agency currently underay, hopes to find out.