In the awful days following the levee breaks in New Orleans, the Baton Rouge Advocate captured a moving photo of a lone violinist, seen from above, playing Bach for a roomful of his fellow hurricane survivors. The photo was reproduced around the world, and this week, AJ Blogger Jan Herman caught up with the subject. Samuel Thompson is “a professional musician, born 34 years ago in Charleston, S.C., who took up the violin at age 9, and has studied at the University of South Carolina, Oklahoma State University and Rice University.” Like so many others displaced by the storm, he is hoping to rebuild his life on the back of his talent, and the works he was performing to soothe the refugees of New Orleans are the same ones he has been using in orchestral auditions over the last several months.
Tag: 09.07.05
Doyle: CBC Lockout Has Become Absurd
It’s been nearly a month since the CBC locked out its workers, including all its on-air talent and journalists, and John Doyle says that what is currently masquerading as news on Canadian TV screens is embarrassing and pathetic. Coverage of the hurricane aftermath has been farmed out to NBC and the BBC, and advance copies of what should be a serious documentary on Quebec separatism were distributed to Anglo critics without translations of the French contained in the film. Meanwhile, some CBC radio hosts have begun to do their shows without benefit of a radio signal, launching podcasts of new shows available to the public free of charge.
CBC Hosts Head Back To School
The hosts of CBC Toronto’s popular Metro Morning program are back on the air – just not at the CBC. Having paid a $5 volunteer fee, the radio veterans behind Toronto’s most popular morning show have begun broadcasting over the University of Toronto’s student station, CIUT. Some locked-out workers worry that such freelancing will only prove the CBC’s point that programming can be produced on the cheap, but the Metro Morning (now known as “Toronto Unlocked”) crew insists that the CIUT show was only made possible through “hundreds of volunteer hours, a television bought from a weekend yard sale and a clock radio.”
The Ultimate Outsider Offers A Glimpse Inside
With the possible exception of Harper Lee, America may not have a more reclusive living author than S.E. Hinton, whose novel, The Outsiders, brought gangs, violence, and disaffected youth into the front of the country’s consciousness in 1967. Intrepid readers could discern from various sources that the author is a woman, that she was only 17 when The Outsiders was published, and that she lives in Tulsa, but little more than that. Now, for the first time, Susan Eloise Hinton is breaking her decades-long public silence to participate in the rollout of a new recut version of Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of the book.
Kazaa Is Dead. Long Live… um… eDonkey?
Kazaa may not survive the fallout from an Australian court decision this week, but the impact on peer-to-peer file trading networks as a whole will likely be negligible, say some experts. “Successors such as BitTorrent and eDonkey have already upstaged Kazaa with a number of technical improvements and edged it out in terms of the volume of raw data that’s exchanged on their respective networks, which feature large numbers of bulky video and software application files… Awkwardly for Kazaa, the court’s position on copyrights is now pretty much where a big portion of the P2P developer world sits, at least in public.”
Giving It Away
The BBC and ITV are teaming up to launch a free satellite TV service in the UK which will bring digital TV signals to Britons who have thus far not been able to receive them. The service will be a direct rival to paid satellite service BSkyB, which is owned by multinational media company News Corp. As part of the deal, ITV will unencrypt its satellite broadcasts, meaning they will be available free of charge to anyone with a receiver.
Beethoven In Chains
Beethoven’s lone opera, Fidelio, is a dark tale of imprisonment and devotion, but it probably never seemed as starkly brutal as in a production going on this week in Philadelphia. The Philly Fringe festival has taken Fidelio on location, summoning audiences to the long-shuttered Eastern State Penitentiary, long known as one of America’s more brutal prisons. But does realism really improve opera? “The genre, by nature, is grand, while prisons, by definition, are constricted. Not an easy fit… In effect, Eastern State Penitentiary left little room for audience imagination. Like most art, opera is irrational. Explain it too realistically and you’re left not with an experience, but a mere explanation – and maybe good intermission chatter.”
Barenboim In Hot Water Again
“Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Daniel Barenboim has defended his decision to deny an interview to an Israel Army Radio reporter, saying she was insensitive to have worn a military uniform at a literary function attended by Palestinians. The incident took place Thursday at the Jerusalem launch of a book on music Barenboim wrote with the late Edward Said.” Barenboim, an Israeli citizen, has regularly raised the hackles of some of his countrymen with his statements of support for Palestinian causes.
Is Sydney Driving Away Its Artists?
Sydney, Australia, is a world-class city in every sense of the word, but now comes evidence that one of those senses may be hurting another. “With the cost of living soaring like some interminable aria, Sydney risks losing its artistic core. Is Sydney becoming a town that discards culture in favour of superficiality and materialism?” The answer is, of course, far more complicated than the question, but there does seem to be a measurable danger to the city’s cultural life.
An American Tragedy, Live & All Too Local
Nick Spitzer’s popular public radio program, American Routes, has always been heavily flavored by New Orleans, the city from whence it originates. Now the program, like everyone else in the Big Easy, is in exile, and Spitzer is using the program as an unofficial catalog of the cultural loss of one of America’s great musical centers. According to Spitzer, Katrina “[may be] America’s biggest cultural disaster – in the sense of the loss of New Orleans’s cultural stuff, the loss of the communities there that interact and the lack of will to move as quickly as if these houses being flooded were on the coast of Kennebunkport. And even for those of us who got out, there’s this grinding uncertainty of whether we’ll ever get back and ever live the same again.”