George Orwell’s wife Sonia, whome th author married three months before his death, “was completely demonized,” says a new biography. Previous biographers have created “a hardhearted, mercenary gold digger who looked like a painting by Renoir and married a skeleton on his deathbed.” By contrast, the new book portrays Sonia as “the most generous person – for her to be reimagined as a monster of cold-heartedness and greed is staggering and extremely distressing.”
Tag: 05.25.03
War & Policy As A Marketing Message
For years critics have been observing the growing sophistication and power of the entertainment/marketing complex and marveling at its effectiveness in selling its messages to the public. But “the media giants that wield such clout don’t always put it to such frivolous use. We are not just plugged into their matrix to be sold movies and other entertainment products. These companies can also plug the nation into news narratives as ubiquitous and lightweight as ‘The Matrix Reloaded,’ but with more damaging side effects.”
Hands-On Philanthropists (With Strings)
Florida billionaires Daniel and Peter Lewis are hands-on arts patrons. Daniel pledged $16 million towards the Florida Philharmonic’s $64 million endowment campaign. But when the orchestra failed to raise supporting capital, he insisted the orchestra be shut down. “The Lewis brothers share a conviction that the arts and other nonprofits must be financially sound – an elusive ideal to nearly every arts group – or be dramatically reconfigured, or even shut down. It is an ideal on which neither of the Lewis brothers seems willing to budge.”
Wal-Mart Censors
Wal-Mart accounts for about 15% of Amnerica’s single-copy magazine sales overall. ‘They’re the biggest newsstand vehicle in the country for magazines. Thus, Wal-Mart can be not only the country’s biggest retailer but its biggest censor as well.”
Open Minds Through Opera
Manuela Hoelterhoff writes that the value of broadcasting opera every week throughout America is hard to calculate. “All I know is that I am not unique, and countless children must have listened to those opera broadcasts and gone on to become mathematicians, Supreme Court justices, stock brokers, teachers and captains of industry (if not, I guess, at ChevronTexaco).”
Inside Pierre Boulez
Just how do you learn to play a Pierre Boulez score? “The leaps are awkward. The spacings of the chords are often large and dense, and there are many, many notes on every single page. As with lots of contemporary music, the patterns, the pitches are nothing like what we grew up practicing. The scores are the kind of music that someone who doesn’t really read music would say [are just] full of black dots and circles. The page is covered with specks.”
Colleges Become Music Police
Colleges are cracking down on students who download music. At Colorado State University, “four or five times a day, college computing administrators receive a message from recording-industry download police giving the specific computer, song and time of a rogue copy made by a student in campus housing. They must pass the message on to a dorm rules enforcer, who in turn must unplug the computer in question and scold the owner that trading in copyrighted songs over the Internet is against the law. Strike two means a formal meeting with a disciplinary officer. Strike three at CSU means the student is denied access to the Internet as long as the wrongdoer remains in campus housing, for the rest of the student’s college career.”
Jerry Springer Is America?
” ‘Jerry Springer – The Opera’ couldn’t be a bigger London success if you dipped it in chocolate and threw it to the lesbians, as one of its few reprintable lyrics suggests. What happened, exactly? This: The world now believes America is Jerry Springer, and Americans are Jerry’s guests. The world believed it long before there was a ‘Jerry Springer Show,’ in fact; the show merely solidified that belief, giving justifiable anti-Americanism a name and a face – that of Springer’s mild, jaded, half-smile of effrontery.”
Libeskind On The WTC – Now The Tough Part
In a classic case of aesthetic symbols confronting political and financial reality, [architect Daniel Libeskind] is fighting to preserve the form – and, with it, the meaning – of his proposal for the 16-acre former site of the World Trade Center. Libeskind also has been forced to confront accusations from a New York City architect that he fibbed when he claimed that, every Sept. 11, on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks that brought down the Trade Center’s twin towers, the sun would shine without shadow on an outdoor plaza he calls ‘the Wedge of Light’. While Libeskind seems to have weathered the plaza controversy, it remains unclear if he will be able to retain control over his design — or whether developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease to the former World Trade Center site, will twist it beyond recognition.”