“Why are we first-time authors so obsessed with the Amazon rankings? Partly because, like pretending to do your tax return or essential research, it offers yet another displacement activity to avoid the real hard business of writing. But it’s also because once your book is out there, all alone in the big wide world, you desperately want to know if it’s thriving or has got completely lost – and for a considerable period nobody can tell you.”
Tag: 10.03.06
The Composer As Inveterate Wiseass
What frequently gets lost in discussions of great classical composers is their actual personality, and in no case is that a greater shame than that of Johannes Brahms. “Cutting irony was a prime Brahmsian mode, and he wielded his wit with special gusto when skewering friends. He was master of the quick putdown… Brahms’ wounding irony, his obliqueness in all things, were part of the armor of a relentlessly private man.”
Pleas To FCC To Stop Media Consolidation
Hollywood talent pleaded with FCC commissioners to slow down media conglomerate consolidation. “Producers described difficulties getting shows on television networks unless they relented to demands to change actors or storylines. They urged the FCC to require 25 percent of primetime programming come from independent producers.”
Report: “News Hour” Too White, Male, Republican
“PBS’ “NewsHour” tilts too heavily toward Republican white men in its sources and needs to do a better job promoting diverse points of view, a watchdog group said in a report issued on Tuesday.”
California Culture Gets A Grade
A new report on culture in California carries some warnings. “Many nonprofit arts organizations, insulated for years from the immediate effects of market shifts, have continued to operate under an outdated understanding of what the general public values.”
Critical Issue – How To Put A Frame Around Dance?
Dance is so all over the map, how do you pick your points of reference? “Critics don’t have to agree that every goal is fine – that’s usually what we’re wondering when we’re irked: ‘Is it or isn’t it?’ – but we do need to understand the difference between the artist’s project and how she’s executing it. We need to know what we’re criticizing.”
Stealing Mexico Blind
Mexican churches have suffered a wave of art robberies. “Looters have picked through Latin America’s archaeological sites for centuries. These church robberies are newer, arising as the taste for colonial religious art has grown in the international art market. Every country in the region has experienced thefts, but the scale is larger in Mexico because of the country’s wealth of colonial art.”
Planned Canadian Portrait Gallery In Limbo
“Hopes are fading that the new Portrait Gallery of Canada is going to be built across from Parliament Hill at the site of the former U.S. embassy in Ottawa. Yesterday a spokesperson for Canadian Heritage said funding for a portrait gallery remains ‘available,’ but what’s at stake now is ‘where it is going to reside.’ “
British Antiquities Sales To Be Monitored on eBay
“After months of negotiation, agreement was reached yesterday between the online auction site eBay, the British Museum, and the government’s Museums, Libraries and Archives council, to control the booming trade in British antiquities on the site. Shoals of archaeological objects, an average of 600 a day when volunteers monitored the site, appear on the site: yesterday’s offers included an elegant Roman bronze dress pin reportedly found in Bedfordshire, a small gold medieval ring, and a silver cap badge, once worn by a member of the household of the unfortunate Richard Duke of York….”
Pete Doherty, Poetry Maven. No, Really!
Babyshambles frontman Pete Doherty may be better known for his tumultuous personal life than for his music, but it turns out all that prison time was an excellent opportunity for reading poetry. Rimbaud, Verlaine … and don’t even get him started on Emily Dickinson. “Aargh, she’s outrageous man!” he says. “She’s [expletive] hardcore! Can’t ignore her.”