Laura Miller writes that there’s a deep-seated prejudice in the collective American mind – especially with respect to educating children – against enjoying fiction purely for pleasure: one should always be able to find in a story some lesson or moral; the goal should always be some sort of self-improvement.
Tag: 01.31.12
Frank Gehry Designing, For Free, New L.A. Jazz Venue
“Having designed L.A.’s signature space for classical music, Frank Gehry is on board to do the same for jazz – although his pro bono work on a new Culver City home for the Jazz Bakery would be on a much smaller scale than his downtown Walt Disney Concert Hall.”
Promising BC Choreographer, Saying He Can’t Get Funding, Quits Vancouver For New York
Joshua Beamish, now 24, founded his own company at age 17; the troupe has since performed in Toronto, Montreal and New York and represented Canada at the Shanghai World Expo. Yet Beamish says he has received only minimal funding from the BC Arts Council because it doesn’t see him as having a sufficient track record.
Philadelphia Orchestra Makes Progress In Its Money Struggle
“The Philadelphia Orchestra Association has made incremental but encouraging progress in the campaign to finance its reorganization and operations for several years beyond an expected exit from bankruptcy. But it still has a ‘mountain of money’ to raise.”
A Philip Glass 75th Birthday Party
The composer stops by for ice cream cake and conversation with his old friends at WNYC radio, where he talks about being parodied on South Park and how he beat the dreaded ninth-symphony curse.
What’s Behind The Music In Shakespeare’s Words? His Grammar, Says Professor
“In a new study Dr Jonathan Hope, from Strathclyde University, compared Shakespeare’s work with playwrights including Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson.” Hope suggests that Shakespeare’s “real genius lay in the unique way he used grammar to construct sentences, adding a poetic element to English.”
Film Banned For Blasphemy Finally Cleared For UK Release
“The controversial short film Visions of Ecstasy has been given an 18 certificate by the British Board of Film Certification (BBFC), after being denied one for 23 years and becoming the only film banned in Britain for ‘blasphemous libel’.”
Toronto Passes Tax Credit To Lure Major Theatre From Chicago, Elsewhere
“In an effort to lure prestigious, big-budget productions such as these away from cities like Toronto to Chicago – and, particularly, the employment, tourism and hundreds of millions of dollars in economic spinoffs they bring – Illinois’s new Live Theater Production Tax Credit will offer a tax rebate up to $2-million (U.S.) for commercial producers of “pre-Broadway and long-run shows” beginning in July.”
End Of The TV-Industrial Complex?
“The mass media which has been used to sell mass products to the mass market no longer captures a mass audience. Instead, digital technology, the internet and social media have shattered the media and its audience into tens of thousands of specialised niches. Seth Godin’s argument is built on his belief that people do not naturally conform to the ideal of normality sold to us by the advertising industry, and free of its coercive influence millions of us will choose our own weird ways of living and working instead.”
New Appetite For Difficult New Music?
When Swiss conductor Baldur Brönnimann was a student 25 years ago, “if you had more than 30 people at a concert it was a failure because it was populist crap”. Today, there are growing signs that contemporary classical music is shrugging off its elitist reputation, with audiences flocking to work previously regarded as austere and impenetrable.