Mumbai, India has a thriving street book-selling business. Or rather, had one. “Most of Mumbai’s pavement booksellers on Veer Nariman Road between Churchgate Station and Marine Drive are now an endangered species. A municipal clean-up is getting rid of hawkers in a city-wide drive to make Mumbai more like modernising Shanghai. Last summer, the city’s municipal agency evicted more than 50 of the roughly 75 pavement booksellers and carted away more than a dozen truckloads of books.”
Tag: 04.29.06
Canadian Opera Company Tests Its New Building
“The COC isn’t interested in monuments so much as a building that can flatter the company’s talents, nurture its growth, and give pleasure to performers and audiences. In that sense, attending these concerts (including a school matinee on Wednesday) was like witnessing the first meetings of the parties to an arranged marriage. You knew it would be made to work. The question was: how, and how well?”
Barry Munitz Gets A Job Back
The former Getty president is returning to California State University system as a teacher and fundraiser. “University officials announced Friday that Munitz, 64, chancellor of the 23-campus system from 1991 to 1998, will hold the title of trustee professor. Along with teaching and administrative assignments, he will help raise money for a new center, the Institute for Urban School Leadership and the Integrated Sciences Complex, which is under construction.”
Bedtime Stories – Not When You’re 12
“According to a a survey, parents start out reading to small children but abandon it as they grow up, to the point where just 3% of children aged 12 say they are read to every day.”
Ballet Pacifica Exodus Continues
The Southern California company is losing its troops piece by piece. “Husband and wife John Gardner and Amanda McKerrow, former dancers with American Ballet Theatre, will leave their administrative posts with the Irvine-based company when their contracts are up at the end of July.”
The Insidious Side Of Book “Packagers”
“What is new is the way the packaging operations dovetail so neatly with the values of the sprawling corporations that now control the publication of most books in America. It can come as no shock to anyone that they believe in marketing and the bottom line over and above everything else. When it comes to books for young readers, the result — in the overwhelming majority of cases — is a focus-group-driven literature of solipsism, which most children and adolescents ignore as bleak and inauthentic, despite all its calculated relevance.”
In Texas – An Old Museum Gets A New Home
Austin, Texas’ Blanton Museum opens a new $83 million gallery. “For a museum that claims one of the country’s oldest and largest Latin American collections and a vast selection of prints, the upgrade could not be more welcome. Previously the Blanton’s displays were crammed into a bland, boxlike area in the university’s art building. At least that was its own space: until 2001, the collection occupied two floors of the humanities research center.”
When Once The Critics Were Titans
A new biography takes the measure of Clement Greenberg. “The power of critics such as Clement Greenberg in art or Edmund Wilson in literature — both did much to shape elite and popular taste in the mid-20th century — is hard to imagine today. Contemporary art is self-parodic and insulated against Greenberg’s style of criticism, and art-world success is now determined almost exclusively in the marketplace, not on the printed page.”
Does Philly Have A New Horn Player Or Not?
The Philadelphia Orchestra has announced, and music critic Peter Dobrin of the Philadelphia Inquirer has published, that St. Louis Symphony Orchestra principal horn Jennifer Montone is about to become the principal horn in Philly. Montone says she’s not comfortable with the announcement, though. ‘It’s not a done deal yet’.”
Filling Leadership At The Chicago Symphony
What to make of the Chicago Symphony’s decidion to appoint Bernard haitink as principal conductor? For one thing, it means Leonard Slatkin (who really wanted the job) is being passed over. “In addition to its work with Boulez and Haitink, the orchestra will make a two-week tour of Europe under the direction of Riccardo Muti in fall 2007. Muti is believed to be the top choice for music director among the musicians, but he is prohibitively expensive and unlikely to want to take on another American music directorship after his tenure in Philadelphia in the 1980s.”