Will pursue initiatives to promote diversity in hiring at the network. ABC expected to follow with its own deal later this week. – Variety 01/06/00
- Washington Post account 01/06/00
Blog
NEW COMPRESSION SYSTEM —
— promises to deliver sound/images/video at much greater rate and clarity than current technology. Solution is software-based, so no hardware upgrades are needed. – Financial Times 01/06/00
ALL-ABOARD MUSICALS
The QE2 plans to start offering new full-length musical theater aboard ship. Those that do well may move on to Broadway. – New York Times
NAZI-STOLEN BOOKS
As World War II was coming to a close, staffers of the Library of Congress fanned out in Germany scouring Nazi book collections and picking out volumes for the Washington library – more than 1 million of them. Now – 55 years later – the US army captain in charge of the mission says that many of the books taken had been looted from Jewish homes, libraries or synagogues by the Nazis, and that these books are sitting unacknowledged on the shelves of the Library of Congress and other American libraries. – Washington Post
CUBAN DANCE TROUPE –
– the legacy of an American from Bryn Mawr, and Cuba’s first professional dance company, celebrates ten years. “Danza Libre, a company of 25 dancers and musicians, creates modern work and preserves and retrains dancers in the country’s disappearing Afro-Cuban traditions.” – New York Times
INTERNATIONAL PLEA
Versailles was badly hit by storms in the past week. Some 10,000 trees were uprooted in 90-mile-an-hour winds and the palace roof and windows were damaged. Now Versailles is trying to raise money for repairs. – Versailles Storm Damage Report
HEANEY WINS WHITBREAD
Nobel novelist Seamus Heaney wins lit award for translation of “Beowulf” – BBC
IT’S A HELLHOLE
London’s Millennium Dome “turns out to be the biggest fake orgasm in the history of passionate pretence. It must also be the only symbolic monument to be erected without anyone having a clue what it is meant to symbolize. Hence the banal shape, all too indicative of its hackneyed exhibition, every old broiler of an idea in the world of arts and entertainment come home to roost.” – The Telegraph (UK)
- MAYBE NOT: Here’s another critic, a self-confessed cynic who kinda sorta gets into the spirit of the Dome. – London Evening Standard
NEW DIRECTOR FOR CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART
Katharine Lee Reid, currently director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, is the daughter of the Cleveland’s legendary director, Sherman E. Lee, a Chinese-art scholar who ran the museum from 1958 to 1983 and built it into a leading showplace for Asian art. – New York Times
- FALLS TO REID TO FULFILL MUSEUM’S $170 MILLION EXPANSION PLANS. – The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
REBORN POMPIDOU
After 27 months and a £54 million modernist fix-up, the Pompidou Museum reopens. For the first time, it is possible to properly take stock of the museum’s extensive holdings from the 20th Century. – The Times (UK)