Category: today’s top story

The superstar tenor had been battling pancreatic cancer for more than a year. He was last seen in public in July 2006. “Like Enrico Caruso and Jenny Lind before him, Mr. Pavarotti extended his presence far beyond the limits of Italian opera. He became a titan of pop culture.”

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il is obsessed with movies. He’s taken personal interest in production, and there’s even a museum dedicated to his movie activities. “His infatuation with film is obvious from the museum’s first room, where an entire wall is covered with a massive list of every occasion when Mr. Kim gave an order to North Korean movie producers. It turns out Mr. Kim has issued an incredible total of 11,890 instructions to North Korean filmmakers since the 1960s.”

“The Venezuelan leader announced the creation of ‘Misión Música’, a government-funded effort to give tuition and instruments to 1 million impoverished children. He made the announcement on his Sunday television show, Aló Presidente, after reading out rapturous British reviews of the youth orchestra’s performances last month at London’s Royal Albert Hall.”

“Public collecting is endangered by a shortfall of resources, a decline in political support and even a loss of nerve that could cut off the flow of masterworks for the people. It has always been hard for museums to compete with private collectors, but driven by the scarcity of great old works and an expanding class of wealthy buyers, the recent stratospheric rise of art prices has utterly outstripped most acquisitions budgets.”

“This summer’s lobbying effort by a new recording industry-sponsored group, MusicFirst, has breathed new life into the drive to make radio pay artists — and not just writers and publishers — for playing their songs, but the issue is as old as Top 40. What’s different now is that the music industry, in deep trouble, is casting around for ways to make up for the steep decline in revenue that hit the recording business after digital downloading changed the business’s basic structure.”

“With so many people working flexible hours and so large a percentage of the audiences retired or elderly, why are theatres so fixated on the 7.30 start and galleries on 10 to 6? Shouldn’t there be more matinees, and more late evening openings for exhibitions? If supermarkets can do it, why can’t arts venues?”

“City officials in Lehi, Utah, on Aug. 28 approved plans by Brandt Andersen, owner of the Utah Flash basketball team, to build an 85-acre Gehry-designed development that includes an amphitheater, hotel, shopping center, restaurants, residences and man-made lakes.”

“There are relatively few operas that explore the African-American experience…. Perhaps partly as a result, opera is not a common entertainment choice among African-Americans. Even at City Opera, known as ‘the people’s opera’ because of its relatively low prices and focus on contemporary work, the audience is overwhelmingly white. City Opera, however, is making a three-pronged effort to change that.”

It’s fashionable to declare it so. The city has a population of only 60,000 and is dominated by tourism. “The Superintendency for architecture, which used to exercise very tight controls on what was done to the interiors of listed buildings, is now allowing them to be turned into hotels, with all the destruction of the originals fabric which that entails.”

HBO’s rivals say that the network has stumbled and declined. “This sort of thing is inevitable when you get to where they got to, where you’re saying, ‘It’s not TV, it’s HBO,’ and that you’re superior to everyone else, and then you hit a fallow period.”