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The Accidents Waiting To Happen

Are we more prone to accidents than in the past? A French philosopher believes so. “Technology and communications have made accidents more global in their impact. In his view, if an accident was long defined as chance, today only its timing and consequences are hard to predict; the accident itself is already bound to occur. To underline the importance of this unwelcome variable to modern society, Paul Virilio is promoting the creation of a Museum of Accidents. ‘The museum’s purpose would not be to ‘spread fear’ but to confront what is no longer a chance event’.”

Australia To Investigate National Museum

Is Australia’s National Museum too “politically correct?” The country’s government suspects so, and has appointed an academic to incerstigate and report back. “The review follows a recent decision by the board to reduce the term of museum director Dawn Casey – an Aborigine – to a one-year contract and brings to a head the conflict between the museum’s council and its curatorial staff over the institution’s direction.”

Vintage Sound On Vintage Machines

Melbourne’s Vintage Sound Association is into old recordings. Not CD’s. Nopt even LP’s. “The club, which has 20 members, meets once a month at the South Camberwell Tennis Club to play their old music on their old machines. Some use cylinders, which, before records, were the original sound source. Later examples, the gramophones, often feature the big conical horns, which in the vintage era acted as speakers. Some units have two horns as an early example of ‘stereo’.”

“Silent Night” Restored to Original Version

Think you know “Silent Night? You don’t know the “real” “Silent Night.” “The modern version comprises only the first two and the last of six original verses.” And there has been a minor musical revision. Now “the Silent Night Association, an Austrian-based appreciation society, has now released a CD containing all the words, sung in 15 languages, in time for Christmas. The music differs subtly in two bars but the change is barely noticeable.”

Explaining The Glenn Gould Phenomenon

Glenn Gould was (and remains) a phenomenon of the music world – a figure taken up in the broader culture to a remarkable degree. Why?”What made Gould’s Goldbergs so popular that they could be plausibly incorporated into the cultural décor of The Silence of the Lambs? Why are they still so popular today? The answers, not surprisingly, have almost as much to do with extra-musical factors as with purely musical ones.”

Rome’s New Center For Music

Rome’s first new concert hall in 70 years opens. “Designed by Genoese architect Renzo Piano, who also worked on the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the three concert halls, open-air arena and recording studios in 20 acres of parkland replace the city’s previous auditorium, the Augusteo, destroyed by dictator Benito Mussolini in 1934.”

Copyright-As-Incentive – It Doesn’t Work

Defenders of copyright laws say stringent protections are essential to ensure the continuing viability of intellectual property. Is it true? Jason Schultz did a few calculations on the movies. There were 36,386 titles released from 1927-1946, he says. Of those: only 2,480 are available on VHS; only 871 are available on DVD; only 114 are available on Pay-Per-View; and only 13 are available in theaters. “If that assumption is correct, then only 2,480 out of 36,386 titles from 1927-1946 are available, or 6.8%. 93.2% are commercially dormant.”

WTC – Think Art & Culture, Not Offices

While most of the architects imagining new structures for the World Trade Center site focused on office space, one suggests culture as the driving idea. “The mission of reconstructing the skyline is one that is proposed at a cultural level. Should we reconstruct it with the offices of Merrill Lynch? We don’t think so. The need is a cultural need. Almost in the same way, the Eiffel Tower became the symbol of Paris, and it is an empty building. This is an empty building.”