The Catholic church is financially devastated in Massachusetts after the chuch’s sex abuse scandals, and closing many churches. “The architectural landscape of Eastern Massachusetts, dominated in so many communities by church steeples and bell towers, is at risk of being diminished as the region’s largest religious denomination, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, prepares to shutter a significant number of parishes, preservationists say.”
Tag: 03.28.04
Sorting Out The Look And Sound Of Opera
“We are told all the time that the audience’s expectations for opera have changed because our society is visually oriented, educated by films and television, even by opera on television. We now expect opera to be theatrically vital. One problem with this view is that our visual society has not been well educated by films and television — media that even now often ignore the “visual” reality of the society they are supposed to reflect. People come in all sizes, shapes, colors, ages, and types of behavior; they engage in passionate love affairs and die nobly or ignobly, regardless of their outward appearance. In a way, opera is a more honest art form than the movies, because people look the way they do rather than the way film fans expect heroes and villains to appear.”
Disgraced Journalists Fail To Find Book Audience
Disgraced journalists Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass have had a flood of publicity for their books. But despite the free promotion, neither one has sold very weel. Blair’s book had an “announced first printing of 250,000 but had sold only about 1,400 copies as of last week, according to Nielsen BookScan. Glass’s effort came out in May and had a first printing of 75,000. Nielsen BookScan has reported sales of 3,400 copies.
Balancing The Composer/Conductor
Many conductors start out as other brands of musicians. It used to be that composer/conductors were common. There aren’t so many today. “Musicians who genuinely straddle that divide — whose talents and personal commitment are equally devoted to composing and conducting — have been the rare exceptions. Mahler was one, Leonard Bernstein another. Salonen is the pre-eminent case in our time. What it means, for him and for his audiences, is a constant, painful assessment of competing priorities. For a listener located outside Los Angeles, it’s hard to look at Salonen’s small catalog of compositions and not begrudge the time and artistic energy it takes to run the Philharmonic.”
Sound And Fury Of A Size
Does size really matter in opera singers, wonders Justin Davidson? “There is a rough, unofficial consensus that in some operas size matters more than in others. Companies will bend over backward not to cast a fat Carmen or a slow-moving Zerlina in Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro,” but all of Wagner, some Strauss and much Verdi are open to singers of any dimensions. As we whittle down the options for large singers, we also deplete the pool of people who can sing these demanding roles. Voices like Deborah Voigt’s are a precious resource.”
Does Media Consolidation Equal Obscenity?
“For years, media consolidation was one of those issues considered worthy of debate only by policy wonks and public interest groups. The general public rarely stopped to read sober-minded studies, such as the one done after the 2002 elections, which found that 60% of the top-rated local news broadcasts had failed to devote one second to campaign coverage. But after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl antics shone a spotlight on Viacom’s MTV-CBS hegemony, people began to connect the Big Media dots. The Super Bowl had more of a galvanizing effect on the media and the FCC than it did on grass-roots America. Ordinary citizens were already upset. For the past three years, when I boot up my computer each morning, I see dozens of complaints about what was on TV the night before. We’re just catching up.”
Censorship Wars
Suddenly, content in the media is getting the once over for “objectionable” material. “Hoping to avoid millions of dollars in fines and protect their licenses, the networks’ gatekeepers are now rushing to cover naked body parts, cut foul language and monitor anything that smacks of poor taste … except when they’re not. The only consistent thread running through the current crackdown — which has ensnared culprits ranging from a chronic provocateur like ousted radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge to an accidental offender like NBC’s “ER” — is how wildly inconsistent it all seems.”
Art Of The Film Credit
Consider the film credit: “At their best, they use the requisite list of names and credits as a mere leaping-off point for clever experiments in graphic design, typography and kinetic wizardry.”
Info-Edu-Propa-tainment – If It’s All The Same To You…
The lines between news, comedy, propoganda and entertainment are so blurred these days, it’s sometimes difficult to tell them apart, writes Frank Rich. “At such absurd moments, and they are countless these days in our 24/7 information miasma, real journalism and its evil twin merge into a mind-bending mutant that would defy a polygraph’s ability to sort out the lies from the truth.”
Saatchi Being Investigated For “Monopolizing” The Art Market
Collector/gallery owner Charles Saatchi is being investigated by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) for allegedly monopolising the art market. “Charles Thomson, a gallery owner who has made it his mission to burst the BritArt bubble, has now taken the extraordinary step of submitting a formal complaint to the OFT. He claims that Mr Saatchi’s pre-eminent commercial position as the key patron of dozens of young artists is monopolistic and anti-competitive.”