“This kind of list, of course, always provokes a lot of tea-leaf reading — as well as high-minded dismissals of its “problematic” nature. This year, one source of discussion is how many of the list’s 21 writers were raised abroad or are nonwhite. Are stories of transnational identity where the literary action is these days? (Some things seem never to change, though: More than half of the chosen writers live in New York City, and the only Southland writer is Maile Meloy, who lives in Los Angeles.)”
Tag: 04.22.07
Going Back To Shakespeare
“After nearly four centuries of Shakespeare scholarship, with countless editions of the complete works and acres of scholarly debate about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ quartos (the form in which some of the play texts first appeared), you might think that the First Folio would have been subjected to the rigours of academic scrutiny. But no. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen are, apparently, the first to have the exceedingly good idea of providing a fully edited version of Shakespeare’s work, as it first appeared in print.”
Atlanta – A Bleak Place For Arts Support
“Artists, arts lovers and nonprofit arts organizations long have bemoaned the low level of public funding for, and awareness of, the arts here. Georgia ranks 46th in state per capita funding of the arts, according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. Atlanta also is below average for American municipalities in public funding for the arts, according to a 2006 report by Americans for the Arts.”
Wanted: A New Kind Of No
“No may be the most important word in our vocabulary, but it is the most difficult to say well. At the heart of the difficulty in saying No is the tension between exercising your power and tending to your relationship.”
Pulitzer – The Cross-Genre Musical Debate
“As should hardly need to be said, excluding jazz from consideration as serious American music is indefensible. And this year, as the first jazz artist to win the Pulitzer since the prize expanded its criteria, Coleman is an unassailable choice. More than this recent album per se, his seminal role in the birth of free jazz and his decades of restless creativity make him majestically over-qualified in the way that those who break barriers of this nature typically are. Still, his selection prompts a simple yet important question of how to compare music across genres.”
His And Her Architect Teams
“Like partners in any other architecture firm, married couples design together, make business decisions together, meet with developers as a team and travel to building sites in tandem. Interviews with some couples suggest that it can be tricky… But on the whole, married architects suggested, the married relationship is a plus for the architecture, allowing for an unsparing candor that takes the work to a higher level.”
A Giant Musical Brought Low
“In a Broadway landscape currently filled with plays and boutique musicals ‘The Pirate Queen’ is a behemoth: large scale, ambitious and one of the most expensive shows of the season, if not the most expensive. So how did a show of this size and scope, and with this pedigree, end up running headlong into some of the worst reviews of the season?”
Reinventing Ballet For A New Generation
“Ballet, like opera and classical music, has a serious image problem in America, and companies are increasingly trying to combat it and attract new, younger viewers. This struggle has even reached the gates of the vaunted City Ballet.”
Stretching The Indie Form
“Dan Pritzker — a billionaire’s son best known as founder of and guitarist for the off-center soul-rock band Sonia Dada, and an important investor in the project as well as its director — has never made a movie.” But his first effort is ambitious: “Eccentric in concept, ambitious in scope and not cheap — backers put the cost at more than $10 million — the twin pictures will probably stretch the limit of what independent film can do by the time they are seen on festival or commercial screens next year.”
Can Sony Be Saved?
“For decades one of the world’s most trusted brands, Sony ran into problems when it failed to react to the technological changes that transformed the markets where it had scored two of its biggest successes — Trinitron televisions and Walkman music players. As consumers switched to flat-screen LCD TVs and the iPod, Sony was plunged into loss — an analogue company in a digital world.”