All that wrangling about how Lincoln Center would get a $1.5 billion makeover seems so far awaay now. “Now the City Opera has decided to move downtown. Avery Fisher Hall is likely to be renovated rather than rebuilt. New York City, in perilous fiscal straits, appears unlikely to be able to fulfill the $240 million pledge that Rudolph W. Giuliani made for the project when he was mayor. The private sector is feeling the economic pinch before fund-raising has even begun. What’s left of the redevelopment project? What part of it can Lincoln Center hope to accomplish? With the economic downturn, all the grand plans now seem like pipe dreams. The 11 private and public groups involved in the redevelopment have been forced to reassess.”
Tag: 05.08.03
Geoffrey Bardon, 62
“Geoffrey Bardon, the artist credited with teaching Australian Aborigines to paint commercially, creating a multimillion-dollar Aboriginal fine art industry, has died aged 62.”
San Francisco Symphony’s Golden Glow
The San Francisco Symphony is visiting London, and Geoffrey Norris says thaat the orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas is vibrant in the way that the City of Birmingham Orchestra was under Simon Rattle. Says Tilson Thomas: “What I felt was important was to give the audience a wider view of what contemporary music could be. I introduced contemporary music that was much more tonal, established some of the minimalist composers and figures from neo-classicism and neo-romanticism, and, now that we’re turning to Ligeti, Boulez, Murail, Scelsi and Berio, people are excited, amused, outraged by what they are hearing, but they have something to talk about.”
The Artist And The Subway Stop
Artist Anish Kapoor’s work has grown so large in recent years it could be mistaken for architecture. Now he’s been asked to produce some architecture. The city of Naples has asked Kapoor to “design a new underground station – a complex piece of infrastructure that is usually the preserve of architects and engineers. ‘They’re mad,’ he says. ‘It’s folly. They don’t know what they’ve let themselves in for. But it’s wonderful; I can’t imagine anything better than doing a tube station’.”
Remembering Mr. Laff Box
Is anyone mourning the death of Charles Douglass, inventor of the TV “Laff Box?” “The question of where the first laughs in Charlie’s Laff Box came from is still subject to debate in TV geek circles. Some say they were sampled from a Marcel Marceau concert; others claim they came from a classic Red Skelton performance; still others say he recorded live audiences from early ‘I Love Lucy’ shows. All of these shows relied heavily on sight gags, which would have simplified the recording process.”