Last fall the orchestra celebrated the arrival of its new music director with the app-cum-game “Bravo Gustavo,” a sort of conducting Rock Star. Now they’re introducing a special app just for the Hollywood Bowl, with everything from concert schedules and ticket sales to videos to GPS driving directions.
Tag: 06.24.10
Savion Glover Taps Into Outer Space, Leaving Music Behind
On his current show, Sole Power: “I fell into this thing about sound. I wonder if people can see sound? … To just be in outer space; not necessarily with music, but with sound. So it’s more spacey, more cosmic than a tone or a song that you can follow along to. It’s just sounds of spaceships taking off or stars landing. … I want to disappear and see if the audience can still see the sound that I’m creating.”
The Rehabilitation Of Michael Jackson
“Within 12 short months, the clueless baby-dangler, the addled Peter Pan who bunked with little Johns and Michaels, the frightening and wasted Dorian Gray alien who cut himself up and cut himself off has evaporated from boldface memory and well-nigh vanished from the entertainment planet. Certainly, the postmortem process of editing out the bad parts is one we have seen before, but this latest example has been a model of mercantile efficiency.”
An Exhibition Asks, Why Make Compost When You Can Make Art?
“Fast-food chicken bones, red lentils, sardine heads and microbes – not the contents of a kitchen bin, but raw ingredients for a new wave of art.” The Museum of Arts and Design in New York’s show “Dead or Alive” features such splashes from this new wave as a dodo sculpted out of chicken bones, a roulette wheel skillfully fashioned from fish heads and bamboo skewers, and a Chinese-style landscape painted on swan feathers.
Speaking of Recycling And Michael Jackson: Artist Makes Him ‘The King Of Pop’ In Three Senses
SoCal artist Seaton Brown “has created a 144-square-foot [Pop Art-style] portrait of the King of Pop out of 1,680 empty soda pop cans” in downtown L.A.’s Pershing Square.
What The Vuvuzela Tells Us About South Africans
“It is an extremely minor consequence of the legacies of colonialism and apartheid that foreigners have been slow to appreciate the South African national character as a whole. … [It’s] high time that we in the international community develop appropriate derogatory stereotypes of the South African people as a whole, black and white, Boer and Bantu. In the noise of the vuvuzela we may well hear the expression of a few special traits.”
Opera Is Alive And Thriving In The UK
“[T]he sun has set on the Empire, we’re rubbish at football and banks, but we really can and should be proud of the way we present opera. I would even claim – not altogether idly – that penny for penny, night by night, we perform it as well if not better than anyone in the world, without the high levels of public subsidy that obtain in France, Germany and Italy.”
Prince Charles’ Chelsea Barracks Letter To Qatari Released
“Complaining that ‘my heart sank’ when he saw the proposed plans, the Prince appears to admit that he is ‘interfering’ in the development and puts forward an alternative scheme based on a sketch by his favourite architect, Quinlan Terry, which he says would have the added benefit of uncovering the river Westbourne, a long-buried tributary of the Thames.”
Artists Gear Up To Protest BP Sponsorships
“A group calling itself Good Crude Britannia, made up of artists, poets, writers and filmmakers, will picket Tate Britain’s summer party next Monday which is billed by the gallery as celebrating 20 years of BP’s sponsorship. … The planned demonstration follows protests this week by a group of artists calling themselves the Greenwash Guerrillas….”
‘The New Normal’ For Many: The Ever-Tighter Budget
“Locally and nationally, as large arts organizations plan for their next fiscal year — which for many begins in July — some are cutting deeper than they have even the previous year. They’re reducing hours, eliminating positions, freezing or cutting pay, and halting employer matches for retirement funds.”