Ever since the NEA released a report bemoaning the decline of literature’s place in American life, defenders of the canon have leaped to reestablish reading as an essential part of life. And who could argue with that? Well, Mark Edmundson isn’t arguing, exactly, but he does have a few quibbles with the approach: “Reading, you hear, is necessary to maintain democracy. It can produce informed citizens. Right, but couldn’t public radio do the same thing? We hear that reading conveys knowledge; it delivers the bounty of the past to the present. Again, good, but in terms of pure rote knowledge, couldn’t film and verbal delivery work nearly as well?”
Tag: 08.01.04
The Real Manchurian Conspiracy?
In the original version of The Manchurian Candidate, soldiers were turned into cold-blooded assassins by “a diabolical method of mind control based on memory’s emotional power.” The brainwashing technique seemed suspiciously familiar to a lot of actors, says Lee Siegel, because it was, in fact, nearly identical to the school known as Method acting, which was developed by “left-wing, socially adversarial” Russians. Hmmmm…
Who Needs Cocktail Parties When You Can Stage An Opera?
“In Britain, these days, opera in the garden is all the rage. If you own a country house with grounds, you turn everything upside down in July and August to stage a home-grown Götterdämmerung (or for the fainter-hearted, Barber of Seville). And patrons, ideally in evening dress, picnic grandly on your lawns during intermissions… The phenomenon feeds on fantasy… the proprietors imagine they’ve traveled back in time, as 18th-century princelings with private courts and orchestras at their disposal, while they reinvent the Arcadian dream. Not that they readily admit it.”
A Museum Everyone Can Hate Together
In the Middle East, a building is never just a building, just as a national boundary is never just a boundary and a religious shrine is never just a tourist attraction. Frank Gehry is finding this out the hard way, as his design for the new Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance draws withering fire from both Israelis – who have called the design “so hallucinatory, so irrelevant, so foreign, so megalomaniac” – and Palestinians, who accuse Gehry of designing a building that calls to mind the Israeli destruction of Yasir Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah. What everyone seems to be saying underneath the rhetoric, however, is that the museum is just too American.
Stuck in Development
The critics are nearly unanimous: Fox’s Arrested Development is the best thing to happen to sitcoms since The Simpsons, and the show is so well-written, well-acted, and refreshing that it could revitalize the entire genre. Now, if only someone other than the critics would watch it.
A New Progressive Book Club
“The 75,000-member Conservative Book Club, founded in 1964, is responsible in the past couple of years for a dozen bestsellers. Thanks to the CBC’s success, earlier this year media giants Bertelsmann Inc. and AOL Time Warner launched a right-wing book club of their own, American Compass. Yet despite the popularity of recent books by lefties like Michael Moore, Al Franken, and Tom Frank, there hasn’t been a book club for progressives.” Until now…
Museums’ Who-Knows Problem
“Museums don’t like to call attention to it, but many of the ancient artifacts in their collections are what curators delicately call ‘unprovenanced’ — that is, they don’t know where the pieces came from because they were removed from their original “find-spot” unscientifically, at best, or illegally, at worst. It’s not a new problem.”
Did Axelrod Sell NJ Symphony Fakes?
Five of the 30 rare violins sold by Herbert Axelrod last year to the New Jersey Symphony might not be what he purported them to be, suggests an investigation. “They are old instruments, certainly, dating at least to the 19th century. But, the experts say, it is likely they were crafted by someone other than the famed violin-makers to whom they are attributed. In short, the experts say, they are probably fakes, worth a fraction of their appraised value.”
Washington Opera’s Tough Season
The Washington National Opera finished its season with a $2 million surplus. But it was a tough season for patrons. The company spent the first half of the season in temporaryt quarters at Constitution Hall While the Opera House at the Kennedy Center was undergoign renovation. “Opera patrons, who paid up to $285 a seat, said parking was murder, the bathrooms were remote, and some sections of the hall were a sweat box. The longer the opera stayed in Constitution Hall, the more operagoers stayed home.”
Dressing Up The Concert Companion
With several orchestras seemingly ready to sign on to use the Concert Companion handheld device, interest seems to be building. “The newer devices have more features: They show video from the stage with up-close images of the conductor’s and musicians’ faces, and they contain program notes like those traditionally included in the concert playbill.”