The National Ballet of Canada and the Canadian Opera Company will soon be sharing a new home. “Based on the experience of the almost three decades it has taken to move two national companies from the 3,200-seat Hummingbird (formerly O’Keefe) Centre to a new home, the two companies’ relationship will continue to be as fraught as you’d expect between a robust, dynamic, operatic sort of character, flushed with pride because it has been the new building’s prime mover, and a cautious, delicate, balletic character, toeing its way onto someone else’s territory.”
Tag: 06.08.06
Will Wal-Mart Lift Parental Advisory Recordings Ban?
Wal-Mart may be ending its ban on selling CDs with parental advisory stickers. The retailer is a major force in the recording business, but only sells “clean” versions of songs. “People seem to think that Wal-Mart is revisiting that decision. There are indications that the new regime is more open to change.”
Chinese Government Yanks Da Vinci Code
China has pulled showings of “The Da Vinci Code.” The movie, “which has been opposed by Christian groups because it suggests Jesus fathered children who continued his lineage, has made $13 million since its release on May 19. It was on its way to becoming one of the highest-earning foreign films in China.”
Osmo Vanska Quits Finnish Orchestra
“After keeping a foot on each side of the Atlantic for a few years, the Minnesota Orchestra’s music director will leave his post as chief conductor of Finland’s Lahti Symphony at the end of the 2007-08 season, concluding a two-decade tenure that began when he was named the orchestra’s music director in 1988.”
House Republicans Propose major PBS Funding Cut
“On a party-line vote, the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees health and education funding approved the cut to the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes money to the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. It would reduce the corporation’s budget by 23 percent next year, to $380 million, in a cut that Republicans said was necessary to rein in government spending.”
Welcome To Temple-Land
These days it isn’t enough to open a temple and expect the people will follow. In Delhi the creators of a new temple has added a little Hollywood pizzaz. “The creators of the new Swaminarayan Akshardham temple complex that towers over east Delhi thought to include several features not commonly found in Hindu architecture, including an indoor boat ride, a large-format movie screen, a musical fountain and a hall of animatronic characters that may well remind us that, really, it’s a small world after all. There are even pink (sandstone) elephants on parade.”
Tijuana As Cultural Mecca?
“From painting, conceptual art and photography to video and music, the city’s artists now seem riveted not so much on border conflicts or a dream destination as on Tijuana itself: an experimental laboratory for people with hybrid identities and a growing global awareness.”
Power On The Move In Hollywood
Two of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies are moving out of Hollywood. Okay, the move is only a mile away. “To the uninitiated, that may seem like a paltry distance. But for the agency world, which for a decade and a half has been clustered along a narrow corridor of power and information on Wilshire Boulevard here, it is the end of something, and the beginning of a more diffuse and more corporate existence.”
Jung On The Block
An important collection of Carl Jung’s papers is up for auction. “The collection shines a light on Jung’s personal and professional preoccupations and includes material that has never been seen by researchers before. ‘They have been seen by Jung scholars and they have been dumbstruck. Gobsmacked was one word that was used’.”
What For Book Expo?
“It’s ridiculous, this pageant of the weird where everyone gets together to celebrate books by ritually destroying their bodies for a weekend and pretending that they’re on a first-name basis with celebrities, but you cannot deny the fact that all of it, from the hundreds of lonely nights of nerdy solitude to the once-a-year chaos of BEA, is done out of love. Love for books. Well, books and free shit.”