You can’t please everyone, but with the much-ballyhooed rollout of its official logo for the 2012 Games, London’s Olympic officials appear to have pleased absolutely no one. The logo, which looks a bit like a game of Tetris gone horribly awry, inspired thousands of Britons to sign online petitions demanding its replacement, and an animated version apparently caused at least ten epileptic seizures before it was shut down.
Tag: 06.07.07
A Gehry Playground? Sounds, Um, Dangerous…
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced that starchitect Frank Gehry has signed on to design a new $4 million playground in the city’s Battery Park neighborhood. “The project, which Mr. Bloomberg first announced at a conservancy gala on Tuesday night, is getting under way as the city has moved to reimagine and redesign its public spaces.”
How Mr. Jones Came To Broadway
Making a musical about teen sexuality is no easy task, so it’s no surprise that the producers of the Broadway smash, Spring Awakening, decided that much of the inherent sexual tension in their story would need to be told through movement. What was a bit of a surprise was that the show scored the services of Bill T. Jones as choreographer. “In some ways it’s a perfect fit for a choreographer concerned with storytelling, the power of gesture and sexual identity. Yet working on a mainstream musical was not an obvious move for Mr. Jones, who has always seen himself as fiercely experimental.”
Dissension From Pride
Cuban-born artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres will (posthumously) represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale, which begins Sunday, and that fact would probably have come as a great surprise to him. Gonzalez-Torres “had a complicated but unabashed love of America and the ideals it represented. His work was often a way to express his bitter disappointment when he felt that the country was failing those ideals.”
Booty Eludes Pirate Queen
It’s official: The Pirate Queen, savaged by critics and largely ignored by ticketbuyers, will close June 17 as one of the costliest flops in Broadway history. “The lavish musical by the team who created Les Miserables and Miss Saigon will have played 85 performances when it calls it quits at the Hilton Theatre.” It cost $16 million to bring the production to New York.
Jazz Fest Gets A Perfectly Timed Gift
The Montreal Jazz Fest, which lost all of its federal funding this year, is getting a CAN$6 million boost from aluminum giant Alcan. The company will become a co-sponsor of the event, along with General Motors. This year’s festival begins June 28.
Big Raises In Store At KC Sym
“The Kansas City Symphony and its musicians have ratified a contract that will provide a 19 percent salary increase over the next four years… It represents a notable change from the three-year contract the players ratified in 2003, which included a pay freeze for the first year and increases of only 2 percent in subsequent years.”
Where’s The Sibelius?
It’s been fifty years since the death of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, but in a music industry obsessed with celebrating anniversaries, Norman Lebrecht says that you’d think no one had ever heard of Sibelius. “His jubilee year might have afforded a chance for universal reassessment, but the orchestral industry flunked it, fearing that long lines of symphonic development without an inherent narrative would deter an impatient, aging audience with a shortening attention span. Sibelius was declared off-message this year, his fall from grace complete.”
The Internet – A False Utopia
“Why are the utopian visions of 40 years ago strangely similar to the ones we hold today? Because business and political leaders have consistently pushed a carefully orchestrated fantasy of the future to distract us from the present, says Richard Barbrook, who explores the subject in Imaginary Futures – From Thinking Machines to the Global Village.”