The story spread like wildfire across the Pacific Rim this week: North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il had been courting superstar conductor Seiji Ozawa to lead the North Korean national orchestra, and Ozawa had repeatedly rebuffed him, saying that “the political environment in North Korea is not one that would allow me to focus on music.” The only problem with the story is that it apparently isn’t true: Ozawa’s representatives say he has never been contacted by Kim, and that the news reports were the first he’d heard of the situation.
Author: sbergman
Wrong In Every Possible Way
When the producers of the new Broadway revival of Grease struck a deal with NBC to air a reality show in which viewers would pick the stage show’s leads, they figured that the TV exposure would be enough to boost their box office take through the roof. Think again: “Grease: You’re The One That I Want” has been trashed by critics, and is hemorrhaging viewers. Worse yet, the expected box office spike never materialized, and most working theatre types think the TV show cheapens their entire profession.
The Great Sundance Guessing Game
You just never know what might happen at the Sundance Film Festival, and picking the indie flicks that will later have a chance to captivate the world (or at least the U.S.) has become a cottage industry among critics. Last year’s surprise smash, Little Miss Sunshine, was a textbook case of an indie achieving wide success, but few saw it coming. “It becomes more apparent every year that William Goldman’s great rule of studio filmmaking applies to the independent world as well: Nobody knows anything.”
Where Are All The Canadian Composers?
The Canadian Opera Company has unveiled its 2007-08 season, and Robert Everett-Green can’t help but notice that, for the second year in a row, not a single Canadian composer is in the lineup. One Canadian work had been scheduled, but was postponed due to the composer’s health problems. Meanwhile, the COC’s British-born general director says that he won’t pander by programming just any Canadian opera: “I have to do something first-rate. It has to convince our audience that contemporary opera matters.”
Taylor Prize Shortlist Released
“A memoir of a rough-and-tumble childhood in Saskatchewan, a biography of one of Canada’s most charismatic leaders and a history of the convulsions in the French art world of the 19th century are the finalists for the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction… The winner will be announced in Toronto on Feb. 26.”
U.S. Sale Leaves Canadian Films Out In The Cold
“About 50 movies are at risk and producers are in jeopardy of losing funding after [Canadian film distributor] ThinkFilm was sold to American interests. Now the filmmakers have called in the lawyers… The filmmakers say the issue isn’t just their movies aren’t being seen, but government rules mean their funding could be in jeopardy.”
Snow Job
Eskimos have 48 different words for “snow,” right? Actually, no, they don’t, regardless of what your junior high English teacher told you, and by the way, there is no such language as Eskimo. “Anthropologists [have been] throwing around all kinds of figures for the number of words Eskimo supposedly [have] for snow without any facts to back them up.” Various efforts are underway to debunk the myth, but linguistic misinformation is often quite hard to counter, especially once the general public believes it knows the truth.
D.C.’s Alliance Director Stepping Down
“Jeremy Skidmore, the visionary artistic director of Theater Alliance, the small D.C. company with big ideas, will leave at the end of this season to pursue freelance directing and take a break from five years as an arts administrator. He oversaw 22 Alliance productions.”
Monet’s Sketchy Story
A new exhibit at a Massachusetts gallery purports to show that Monet was not “the anti-draftsman he led the public to believe, and that he relied on drawing both to prepare for his paintings and as an independent form of expression… Although Monet helped perpetrate the myth that he did not, and maybe even could not, draw, nearly 500 of more than 2,500 works mentioned in his catalogue raisonné are sketchbooks, drawings and pastels. Yet, until now, few scholars have paid much attention to them.”
The Future Of TV?
“Somewhere between amazing greatness and raving geek fantasies of world domination lives the Venice Project,” an ambitious collaboration aiming to combine the best of television and the internet. “Free to viewers who download the player app. Friendly to content owners, thanks to industrial-strength encryption. Delightful to advertisers, adding pinpoint targeting to their all-time favorite medium. Everyone’s a winner!” Of course, it’s never actually that simple…