Archive for January, 2007

"The World Is Watching. Not Americans."

a€oeThe Death of Mr. Lazarescu,a€A which made all of $80,000 in its brief theatrical run, is far from the only foreign movie to open here to the applause of critics and the silence of the public. I dona€™t mean the mass public a€" I have never put much stock in the Utopian fantasy that, if only the multiplex chains would see reason, internationally beloved auteurs like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami would become box-office powerhouses a€" but rather the aesthetically adventurous, intellectually curious segment of the population that has historically been there for foreign films.

The gap between critical approbation and cultural currency has widened, even as the number and variety of critics has expanded. The arguments a€" in the virtual salons of the Internet and the actual rooms where movie critics hold their year-end meetings a€" are perhaps more intense and contentious than ever, but they also seem to take place in a series of echo chambers, sealed off from wider, less specialized conversations.

[nytimes] online award winner[indiewire]

Real estate India

[indianrealestateforum]

Modern jazz

Freedom, community, spirituality, finding your own voice a€" jazz means many things to many people.

All the more sad, then, to hear a genius like Ornette Coleman, who pioneered "free jazz" in the late ’50s, sound so stuck in the racial paradigms of the past.

Seemingly annoyed that IAJE was largely patronized by white academics a€" "If we were white people, would this conversation be the same?" he asked his hapless interviewer, saxophonist Greg Osby a€" Coleman answered questions about his music with obtuse, impenetrable riddles.

Coleman wasn’t the only one concerned about jazz becoming "too white." "I’m afraid I’m going to wake up one morning and hear that jazz was invented by [white trumpeter] Bix Beiderbecke," said Suzan Jenkins, president of Jazz Alliance International, a subsidiary advocacy group of IAJE.

"Unfortunately, I think jazz has fallen into the hands of a lot of white males," said flutist Anne Drummond, a Garfield grad, who is white and has made a successful career in New York. "It’s like a museum."

[seattletimes.nwsource]

a€oeIt’s a major paradigm shift,a€A said Bill McFarlin, IAJE’s executive director.

a€oeIt may not be as huge as the shift from silent movies to talkies, but it’s a major turning point. What you’re seeing is the result of a shift in the way music is produced and consumed, and in the way people pay for it. One thing IAJE is trying to do is create a dialogue about where we’re going. The survival of the recording industry will be very important for jazz.a€A

Such adversity is nothing new for jazz, a music that has long been embraced around the world but is still striving for more respect and recognition here in the land of its birth. To help achieve that goal, the National Endowment for the Arts this year will dramatically boost the size of its a€oeNEA Jazz in the Schoolsa€A program. By the end of 2007, it will be available to 8 million high school students, up from 4 million last year.

[signonsandiego]

[music.mnp]

yoik

This is the yoik - the song of the Sami, the aboriginal people of arctic Scandinavia - and the oldest extant music tradition in Europe, dating back more than 2,000 years. The yoik has been alternately banned and suppressed for centuries.

…

Traditionally, the Sami were nomadic hunter-gatherers and reindeer herders who roamed the tundra across the crest of Norway, Sweden and Finland. The area is commonly known as Lapland, and its inhabitants as Lapps. Sami do not recognise either name.

‘It’s not a "land" at all, actually,’ says Harald Gaski, professor of Sami literature at the University of Tromso. ‘Samiland is a theoretical conception,’ he says. ‘It has no borders, therefore it can stretch.’ Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why these largely peaceful people were perceived as such a threat by the Norse who came up from the south to colonise and to subjugate them. Socially and racially, the Lapps were considered an impoverished people, and named accordingly. Lapp means ‘patch’ in Swedish.

[observer.guardian]

Rossyln chapel

qtvr panorama[rosslynchapel]

Foto del dia 1.22

HDR[flickr]

Reciprocation

The average U.S. schools’ endowment funds posted a 10.7% return on investment during the year, according to the survey of 765 schools by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). By comparison, the S&P 500 gained 13.5% in 2006. Harvard’s $28 billion endowment tops the US rankings by market value, followed by Yale at $18 billion. Harvard’s endowment grew 13.5% last year, including both market returns and gifts.

[metrics2]

Space invaders from space

[wonderlandblog]

"You will wish to remain anonymous"

Prediction: The new hot thing in our future will be anonymity.

To be un-famous.

To be Googled a€" and to not be there. No link. No Wiki. No tube, space or face. No nothing.

Ita€™s too late for most adults a€" anyone with a job, a drivera€™s license or a signature on a public document. But in a world where anyone can be known, what could be cooler than not being known? In a celebrity-saturated culture, what could be hotter than not being a celebrity?

You may have noticed that celebrity aina€™t what it used to be. Where there was once hard work and accomplishment behind onea€™s being awarded celebrity status, today one need only wake up, plug in the video cam and hit a button.

article at [thestate]