Over the past year Boston public radio station WBUR has lost about $2 million in underwriting grants, the station says, because of underwriters charging that the station’s news coverage of the Middle East has been anti-Israel. Monday there was a protest on Harvard Square outside a large independent bookstore that had pulled its funding over the issue. Activists handed out leaflets reading “Sells Words but Suppresses Words.”
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Mark Morris, Classic
“Mark Morris, the uppity squirt who got himself banned from the American Dance Festival eighteen years ago for crying ‘No more rape!’ during a piece created by Twyla Tharp, is now 46 years old. He performs in fewer dances these days; he’s even cut his trademark curls. His company, now in its twenty-second year, is filled with dancers young enough to be his children rather than the friends with whom he came of age.”
Fire Destroys Fringe Venues
A fire in Old Town Edinburgh damages a number of venues that host events for the annual Fringe Festival. But a Festival spokesman says “it would only be a handful of venues out of 183 that we had on board last year, so we don’t expect it to affect the festival in any way.”
The Educated Unread
Was a time that if you were educated you read. Seriously. Now you can be educated and not have to read. “We are, as the experts like to say with a horrified sense of wonder, aliterate – able to read, and read well, but disinclined to do so. We can blame time and tiredness, changing technologies and altered priorities; still, a reluctance to read is not all that different from an inability. As Mark Twain observed, in that terribly trenchant way of his, ‘The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them’.”
LA County Museum Kills New Home?
“The decision last Wednesday by the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to put on hold its extensive $200 million-$300 million renovation and expansion plans at its Hancock Park campus is all but a death knell for the project, one of the city’s most important cultural initiatives.”
Berlin’s Battling Opera Houses
Berlin’s three opera houses are scrapping with one another to survive. “Does a city really need three opera houses? Probably not, but Berlin has long taken pride in its embarrassment of operatic riches. If one house closes, the city will end up with the same eminently sensible—and thus eminently predictable—arrangement that applies in New York, Paris, and London. There will be the “big” house, like the Met or Covent Garden, presenting de-luxe productions with international stars; and there will be the “alternative” house, like New York City Opera or English National Opera, staking out slightly more adventurous repertory. With three companies, you never quite know what you’re going to get.”
Kennedy People
The Kennedy Center Honors staged its 25th annual gala Sunday. This year’s honorees are actors Elizabeth Taylor and James Earl Jones, dancer Chita Rivera, singer-songwriter Paul Simon and conductor James Levine.
SF Ballet – A Comer…
“Long regarded as a solid regional institution, San Francisco Ballet has vaulted forward in the past decade. Versatility and aplomb, distinctive stars from around the globe, depth in the corps, a clean and confident style and a broadly built repertoire now place San Francisco well ahead of the regional pack and into the first tier of major companies.”
SFMOMA – The Big Push
San Francisco’s highest-profile art museum? SFMuseum of Modern Art. “SFMOMA stands reinvented in its landmark – though not universally admired – downtown building designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta.”
Turner Winner Unfazed
Just who is Keith Tyson, this year’s Turner Prize winner? For one thing, he’s unfazed by controversy: “The Turner is an important prize precisely because it keeps interest frothing away at the top end. And to ask ‘Is that art?’ is pointless. If you went to a Mercury Music Prize, you wouldn’t say: ‘Is a country-and-western album better than a punk album?’ You wouldn’t ask: ‘Is it music?’ You would just think: ‘It’s not my kind of music.’ What do I feel? How do I respond to it? Is it interesting? Those are the questions to ask.”