“The voice of the artist is present in any artistic work, and those of the characters exist in any artistic work with an actual or implied story. However, the added component of the player or players, who give meaning to the characters and story, and make decisions affecting their fates is the third, unique voice.”
Tag: 03.02.11
Wherein I Try To Explain Why People Want To See “Spider-Man”
How to explain the sticky allure of a show that has been mocked not once but twice on “Saturday Night Live”? Don’t discount the NASCAR factor: There is a reasonable possibility of seeing a crash.
Cyber-Utopianism? Now Wait Just A Darn Minute…
“Despite all the heady social theorizing of Clay Shirky and the Wired set, the web has not, in fact, abolished the conventions of market value or rewritten the rules of productivity and worker reward. It has, rather, merely sent the rewards further down the fee stream to unscrupulous collectors like Chris Anderson.”
Now It Begins: Critic Calls Publicly for James Levine to Retire From Met
Justin Davidson: “But even if he’s in fine fettle for the anniversary gala on May 1, the time has come to make him conductor laureate for life and hand the keys to someone else.”
Nordstrom Leases Seattle Art Museum Tower
“Nordstrom has agreed to lease all the downtown office space the Seattle Art Museum once rented to Washington Mutual, a deal that will help fill the deep financial hole the bank’s collapse created for the museum.”
Jacques d”Amboise Remembers Balanchine
“The service was reaching its end, and lights faded on the stage. Many of us stayed, lined up to approach Balanchine on his bier. At my turn, I stepped up, touched his hand, petted it, really, tears dripped off my cheek. I leaned over to kiss his forehead. Luckily, I did not drip on his face. What did I expect? Balanchine’s forehead to be cold on my lips! It was warm.”
St. Petersburg Mansion Where Onegin Premiered Marked for Demolition
“[The] Abaza Mansion was built in 1790. In the 1870s and ’80s, the building saw musical evenings held by Abaza’s wife, singer Yulia Abaza, during one of which Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s opera Yevgeny Onegin was premiered.” In 2007, the building was handed to a developer who wants to build a hotel on the site; a campaign to save the mansion has now begun.
Social Networking As A Mythic Force
The role of Facebook and Twitter among young people “reminds me a bit of how Homer’s poetry defined, to a large extent, what it meant to be Greek in the 7th century BCE: myths unite people, and the power of social networking has now mythic force. To be young is to know how to connect via Facebook and Twitter, is to understand the new digital code of conduct and live by it.”
Michel Houellebecq, Singer-Songwriter
“Surprisingly for a writer whose latest literary works generally seem to cause a media kerfuffle in his native France and beyond, Michel Houellebecq’s new single seems to have slipped into the public domain with little fanfare. … Yet [his] new single … more than holds its own in the pop/ballad milieu.”
Met + Juilliard: Marriage At At The Highest Level
“Who knows what the full artistic implications of the Met’s partnership with Juilliard will be over the coming decades, but it’s an institutional streamlining of a kind that happens only rarely at this level.”