Everyone knows that hockey is a national obsession in Canada, but even some Canadians are surprised by the way the game has suddenly exploded across the nation’s cultural scene. Just as baseball has inspired generations of American authors, singers, playwrights, and photographers, so hockey is now finding its way onto Canadian stages, screens, and bookstore shelves. If baseball is as pastoral and cerebral as Americans would like to believe themselves to be, hockey is distinctly Canadian: simultaneously graceful and gritty, with a quiet undercurrent of ugliness that almost requires a poet’s soul to understand. And just as hockey is facing a crisis that threatens to destroy the sport, many Canadians fear that their unique culture may be slipping away as well…
Tag: 04.10.04
U.S. Denies Visas To Cuban Supergroup
“A two-month US tour by the 15-piece Cuban jazz-pop band Cubanismo! has been canceled because its members were denied visas to enter the United States. The group had planned a 43-show, 34-city itinerary… Cubanismo!, made up of musicians from various Cuban bands, has played in the United States several times over the last decade, including last year.” The Justice Department has offered no explanation for the refusal to grant visas.
Glamorizing The Whitney Biennial
This year’s Whitney Biennial is a hit with public and press alike, says Peter Goddard, “because some of it reflects a new kind of thinking about art. But that brings us back to glamorizing. Is there such a word? There should be, to point to how much otherwise indescribable stuff is going on at the Whitney Museum of American Art.” In addition to the new embrace of art that’s hard to “get,” there is also a distinct sense of generational turnover about the Biennial, and the subtle air of competition between young and old, old and new, has given the whole event a feeling of renewed vigor.
The Apartment Building That Made Your City Boring
“At first glance, it is an apartment building like countless others around the world. A medium-height slab made of concrete and glass, it occupies an anonymous site surrounded by parking lots and a shopping mall. Appearances can be deceiving. This is Unité d’habitation, arguably the most famous apartment building ever constructed. Designed by Le Corbusier, the celebrated and enormously influential apostle of modernism, this is the building that would save mankind and lead us into the future.” What it actually did was lead urban planners around the U.S. “to an appalling and unprecedented urban sterility and homogeneity.”
Canadian Eye For The Queer Guys (And Gals)
“As American courts and politicians wrestle over the legality of same-sex marriages, Canadian producers are embracing them. With Canadian courts recently allowing and recognizing same-sex marriages, filmmakers are documenting gay and lesbian couples heading to the altar wearing chocolate thongs beneath their tuxedos and placing femme-butch toppers on their white-icing cakes… But besides the frills, what Canadian filmmakers have stumbled on and are chronicling is a modern-day underground railroad of same-sex couples coming to Toronto from the United States to exchange marriage vows.”
The Guitar That Changed Rock ‘n Roll
The Fender Stratocaster may be the most famous instrument of the 20th century, and it turns 50 this year. From Les Paul to Jimi Hendrix to Eric Clapton, the guitar built with an eye to architecture and a sound like nothing anyone had ever heard before has helped define three generations of rock ‘n roll sound.
The Clear Channel Crusade Claims Two More Filthy Smut Peddlers
The increasing paranoia among broadcasters over the FCC’s threatened crackdown on “inappropriate” on-air content has led radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications to declare a no-tolerance policy on risque talk and bad language for all of its stations. Last week, that policy saw shock jock Howard Stern yanked from six Clear Channel stations, and now, two Florida DJs have lost their jobs after accidentally leaving their mics hot during a commercial break, and allowing what they thought were off-air comments of a sexual nature to go out over the air of station WKLS.
More Trouble Ahead For Howard?
Howard Stern’s problems may not end with being yanked by Clear Channel, and the New York Post’s research indicates that the self-styled King of All Media shouldn’t expect much support from his remaining affiliates. “Of 17 Stern affiliates contacted by The Post – there are now 35 altogether – only four station managers expressed unabashed support. Another is on the fence, and 12 more avoided all comment – possibly a bad omen, considering that big fines may be headed their way, too.”
The Terrorist On Broadway
“Broadway has always been an incubator of lunatic dreams, but these days, with the outrageous expense of putting on a production, and a theater marketplace ever more reliant on the credit cards of out-of-towners, a lot of the adventurousness has gone out of producing.” So for Rocco Landesman to be seriously pitching a play featuring a suicide bomber as a sympathetic character to the Broadway poobahs is, well, something of a noticable display of hubris. In fact, most of Landesman’s usual New York investors had closed the door before he even got the pitch out of his mouth.
Re-re-reconsidering Shostakovich. Again.
The debate over whether Dmitri Shostakovich was a talented but limited composer in the pocket of the Soviet leadership; or a secret dissident, hiding messages of anti-Stalinist revolt in his music, is unlikely to ever come to a satisfactory conclusion. But a new book by Solomon Volkov, whose earlier book Testimony reignited the Shostakovich debate a quarter-century ago, sheds some new light on the complicated relationship between Shostakovich and his chief antagonist (and chief sponsor,) Josef Stalin. Volkov divides the composer’s career into two periods: the brash, exploratory years before Shostakovich penned his opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtnsk,” and the cautious, paranoid period after Stalin denounced “Lady Macbeth” as an anti-Soviet muddle.