“For many people, public access TV is still symbolized by ‘Wayne’s World,’ a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch that portrayed two slackers doing a so-bad-it’s-good program from a basement rec room. But today, the Waynes of the world have a whole new stage on the Web. Homemade videos are viewed by millions each day, giving anyone with a video camera and a fast Internet connection their own ‘show.’ So do we still need public access TV?”
Tag: 08.05.07
Audiences Like Melody. In O.C., That’s What They Get.
Tim Mangan takes a look at the offerings in Orange County’s upcoming season and notes that, “for the most part, the new music that is being played isn’t all that challenging (not that it has to be). But there is, and always has been, a huge lacuna in the modern repertoire that is performed here in O.C., and it makes it difficult for listeners to hear any new music with a perspective that will allow them to comprehend it or place it in some sort of historical continuum.”
Graffiti: Art Or Blight? The Debate Continues.
“As a city volunteer rolled dark green paint over a bright jumble of scrawlings and imagery on a fence at Warm Water Cove Park on Saturday, Paul Barron stood alongside holding a yellow sign with an ornately lettered message: ‘Celebrate Graffiti!’ ‘Painting over artwork isn’t gonna prevent any crime,’ Barron, who described himself as a professional muralist and graffiti artist, told reporters who had come to witness a culture clash on a balmy morning at San Francisco’s southern waterfront. ‘They’re taking away our voice … killing the only pure form of art.'”
L.A. Noir Novelist Gets A Posthumous Second Chance
“Like a lot of noir novels, the career of Douglas Anne Munson, a hard-boiled Los Angeles writer who once seemed like one of the city’s bright new lights, just gets murkier and more confusing the closer you look.” It remains elusive even as champions of the novelist, who used the pen name Mercedes Lambert and died in 2003, ensure that her work gets another chance at the spotlight. “‘She wrote mystery novels,’ said Michael Connelly, who never knew Munson but called her first novel, ‘El Niño,’ … a major influence on his work. ‘But she was probably the biggest mystery of all.'”
At One-Artist Museums, Context Is Key To Success
“Leaders of one-artist museums across the country — including the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., the Isamu Noguchi Museum in New York and the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Mont. — spend their days dreaming up ways to promote the legacies of individual artists. Instead of creating a shrine or a morgue, directors of these museums try to position the artist as the center of a universe that reaches out to scholars, artists and the public.” And the number of such museums has grown in the U.S. in recent years.
Anglican Hymnals To Include Reggae Songs
“Songs by late reggae legends Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, both devout Rastafarians, will be included in a new collection of Anglican church hymnals in Jamaica. Marley’s ‘One Love’ and Tosh’s ‘Psalm 27’ will be the first reggae tunes to appear in songbooks alongside traditional worship music on the island that gave birth to reggae, said church leaders preparing a new collection of hymns.”
Bergman? Antonioni? Never Heard Of ‘Em.
The deaths last week of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni highlighted their irrelevance — a marginalization due not only to the passage of time, Ty Burr argues, but to the way we watch movies. “If you wanted to see an old movie three decades ago — and you were lucky enough to live in a big city — you went to a revival theater and joined the worshipers at the altar. … What was once a vibrant communal experience has become a solitary pursuit. As with so many other things in the 21st century, movie history is a Balkanized casualty of an attention-deficit culture.”
A Violin Star, Unrecorded And Unremembered
“Composers of any era can be immortalized through their scores, but posterity is not as kind to performers who lived before the advent of recordings. The Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim was arguably the most important fiddle player of the 19th century, and Aug. 15 will mark the 100th anniversary of his death. But don’t worry if you’ve made other plans and can’t attend the centenary tributes. There are virtually none, at least not in this country. Almost no one seems to have remembered.”
Save The Celebrity Interview. No, Seriously.
“Beyond all the cliches about duels and dances and dates, celebrity interviews are essentially collaborative performances, carefully crafted and staged to deliver a flawless portrayal of false intimacy. They are the secular confessional, the tutorials in morality (or at least manners), the chance to occupy the same normative grid that governs everyone in the world, even its best woman. Executed well, the Celebrity Interview is the very Platonic ideal of public privacy. It may be a bankrupted form, but it’s still worth saving.”
Off-B’way, Signature Quietly Changes Playwrights’ Lives
“Playwrights who dedicate themselves to working in the American theater can look forward to lives of lonely scribbling, mystified condescension and relative penury…. As their careers lengthen, they can expect our culture’s congenital amnesia to enshroud them, either in the mantle of the one play that made their name or in the outer realms of utter obscurity. And then James Houghton might give them a call. ‘I think every single playwright in this city, maybe the country, is wondering when and if it’s gonna happen,’ said Tony Kushner….”