Henry Segerstrom Dies at 91

Henry Segerstrom, a Costa Mesa farmer, land developer, and philanthropist from a Swedish immigrant family, has passed away.

He built South Coast Plaza into one of the world's premier luxury shopping centers, and he was the principal benefactor to the development of the Orange Country Performing Arts Center, which built the O.C.'s reputation as a major regional center for the fine arts.

At the Costa Mesa Daily Pilot, "Henry Segerstrom, South Coast Plaza and arts center pioneer, dies at 91."

And at the O.C. Register, "Henry T. Segerstrom, 91, saw bean fields and grew style, creating world-class shopping, arts centers in South Coast," and the L.A. Times, "Henry Segerstrom, O.C. developer and philanthropist, dies at 91."

New York Metropolitan Opera Cancels 'Death of Klinghoffer'

At Truth Revolt, "Breaking: Met Opera Cancels Anti-American, Anti-Semitic Broadcast."

And at CBS News New York, "Metropolitan Opera Cancels Simulcast Amid Anti-Semitism Fears." And at the Los Angeles Times, "Metropolitan Opera cancels 'Klinghoffer' cinema broadcasts."

Thieves Steal 300-Year-Old Stradivarius from Musician

Some of these violins are worth millions. Why the dude was casually taking his out to the car in the parking lot is beyond me.

At NYT, "A Violinist’s Triumph Is Ruined by Thieves":

It should have been one of those nights musicians live for. Frank Almond, the concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra for nearly two decades, had just closed a chamber concert in his own “Frankly Music” series with Messiaen’s hushed, eerily intense “Quartet for the End of Time.” Mr. Almond drew the graceful, ringing high notes of the finale from his prized 1715 Stradivarius violin, producing a tone so intensely focused that the audience in the Wisconsin Lutheran College’s 388-seat auditorium sat in awed silence for 20 seconds before applauding.

But the glow of the moment evaporated quickly, once Mr. Almond, 49, stepped into the college art center’s parking lot at 10:20 p.m. Monday, his violin carefully swaddled against the subzero temperatures and minus-25-degree wind chill. And as he neared his car, a figure stepped up to him and shot him with a stun gun.

It happened in a matter of seconds: Mr. Almond dropped the violin, the attacker scooped it up and jumped into a late 1980s or early ’90s maroon or burgundy minivan, where an accomplice was waiting to speed away. Edward A. Flynn, the Milwaukee police chief, said late Thursday afternoon that Mr. Almond had described the thieves as a man and a woman. Chief Flynn has given the value of the violin as “the high seven figures.” The police said earlier that the violin’s empty case had been found several miles from the hall.

A spokeswoman for the orchestra confirmed that the instrument was insured, but said that because of the investigation, she could not provide details about the amount, or what restrictions, if any, applied to the use of the instrument. Given its prominence — high-resolution photographs of Strads are plentiful — it would be virtually impossible to sell the instrument on the open market.

“We’re not engaging in the pretense that this is just any other crime,” Chief Flynn said on Thursday. “This is an extraordinary art theft. It is just as extraordinary as if some master criminal crept into the Milwaukee Art Museum and stole several of its most valuable pieces. It’s an inordinately rare violin of unquestioned provenance, made 300 years ago and worth a lot of money. So obviously we are treating this like much more than just another mugging.”

Right.

Which again raises the question of why the dude didn't have armed guards transporting the instrument for him. I shake my head at this story.

More at that top link. Really. Keep reading. It's an extremely prized violin. Only 650 like instruments still exist.

'A few years ago, when the company went to London, some of them were able to go to the factory and meet their maker...'

An interesting quotation, about dancers for New York's City Ballet, who have their point shoes custom-made by a London shoe company. And occasionally, they visit the factory to "meet their maker."

At NYT, "At City Ballet, Footwear Is Almost as Important as Feet."

A photo-slideshow at the link. David H. Koch, of the left's reviled billion Koch brothers, is a benefactor of the company.

'Blue Is the Warmest Color' Tops Daily Beast's '10 Best Movie Sex Scenes of 2013'

I used to go to a lot of foreign art films when I was in college, and I would have probably seen "Blue Is the Warmest Color."

These Daily Beast dolts are getting an erection out of it, however.

The 10 Best Movie Sex Scenes of 2013: http://t.co/RYkUsYFZy3 pic.twitter.com/PRwtWDU0oX

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 21, 2013

It was the most talked-about sex scene of the year for a reason. Abdellatif Kechiche’s three-hour French drama centers on Adèle (Exarchopoulos), a teenager who falls for blue-haired collegiate art student Emma (Seydoux). After sharing a few kisses in the park, the sexual tension builds to a fever pitch, resulting in a seven-minute paroxysm of sexual desire replete with clawing, slapping, scratching, moaning, and howling. Adèle and Emma contort themselves into a plethora of sexual positions. It’s feral, an explosion of their desire for one another. The scene is a bit problematic, too. It’s composed of medium shots from the perspective of the filmmaker (male gaze), never shifting to the perspective of the women, and it does drag. Oh, and the actresses hated shooting it—over 10 days. Nevertheless, it’s a powerful, important scene that challenges viewers’ heteronormative cinematic perspective. The first time I viewed it was at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, seated next to a lil’ old lady slurping a gigantic cup of coke, who “oohed” and “aahed” the entire time. Priceless.

I don't see the sex-scene video, but I'll tell you, this movie's like a how-to manual for postmodern queer feminism.

Mystery of the Gurlitt Family and the Munich Nazi Art Find

At Der Spiegel, "Phantom Collector: The Mystery of the Munich Nazi Art Trove":

The world has been captivated by the discovery of more than 1,400 works of art in a Munich apartment, among them many lost masterpieces stolen by the Nazis. The mystery surrounding the paintings reveals much about the great tragedies of the 20th century -- and Germany's attempt to grapple with its past.

Two men are on horseback, it's summer, the colors are radiant, the riders are deep in conversation, and one of the horses prances in the surf. It's a brief moment on a beach in Holland - but it is also a moment for eternity.

Max Liebermann's painting, "Two Riders on the Beach," is an Impressionist masterpiece. He painted it in 1901, and a Jewish sugar refiner from Breslau in Lower Silesia, now the Polish city of Wroclaw, owned it for more than 30 years -- until the Nazis confiscated the work. After that, it disappeared.

Two attorneys in Berlin have been searching for the Liebermann for the last five years. Lothar Fremy and Jörg Rosbach specialize in restitution cases. In the postwar period, they helped clients assert claims for expropriated property in eastern Germany. The lawful heirs of the Liebermann paintings are brothers, 88 and 92, who live in London and New York, respectively. The sugar refiner from Breslau was their great uncle. The painting is probably worth about €1 million ($1.34 million) today.

When Fremy and Rosbach switched on the television last Tuesday, they weren't expecting much. The public prosecutor's office in the Bavarian city of Augsburg was giving a press conference on a mysterious Munich art find, and it was being broadcast live. Yet what they saw on TV was the announcement of the largest discovery of lost art from the Nazi period since World War II. Eleven of the 1,406 art works that had been seized in Munich a year and a half ago were presented in the press conference. The Liebermann was one of the paintings.

Talk about international intrigue.

Continue reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "Nazi Art Cache."

Nazi Art Cache

An outstanding commentary, from Christopher Knight, at the Los Angeles Times, "Lift the veil from the Nazi art cache."

Winged Victory of Samothrace

Here's the real thing.

I love it.

Via Wikipedia:

The Winged Victory of Samothrace, also called the Nike of Samothrace, is a 2nd-century BC marble sculpture of the Greek goddess Nike (Victory). Since 1884, it has been prominently displayed at the Louvre and is one of the most celebrated sculptures in the world. H.W. Janson described it as "the greatest masterpiece of Hellenistic sculpture."

I had art history in college and we used H.W. Janson's, History of Art. It must've had an impact on my, because I'm still amazing by that sculpture.

PREVIOUSLY: "LBCC Academic Senate Retreat at Rancho Los Alamitos."

Roger Ballen Interview at Der Spiegel

This guy's got quite the body of work.

See, "Photography Legend Roger Ballen: 'Photos Are Like Fossils'."

Who Ruined the Humanities?

From Lee Siegel, at WSJ:

When people wax plaintive about the fate of the humanities, they talk, in particular, about the slow extinction of English majors. Never mind that the preponderance of English majors go into other fields, such as law or advertising, and that students who don't major in English can still take literature courses. In the current alarming view, large numbers of people devoting four years mostly to studying novels, poems and plays are all that stand between us and sociocultural nightfall.

The remarkably insignificant fact that, a half-century ago, 14% of the undergraduate population majored in the humanities (mostly in literature, but also in art, philosophy, history, classics and religion) as opposed to 7% today has given rise to grave reflections on the nature and purpose of an education in the liberal arts.

Such ruminations always come to the same conclusion: We are told that the lack of a formal education, mostly in literature, leads to numerous pernicious personal conditions, such as the inability to think critically, to write clearly, to empathize with other people, to be curious about other people and places, to engage with great literature after graduation, to recognize truth, beauty and goodness.

These solemn anxieties are grand, lofty, civic-minded, admirably virtuous and virtuously admirable. They are also a sentimental fantasy...

Continue reading.

A lovable essay!

Ben Howe Slams Tea Party Film at Reviled BuzzFeed

I saw this controversy yesterday on Twitter, where Jimmie Bise was refusing to even read Howe's essay at BuzzFeed.

See John Nolte, at Big Hollywood, "RedState's Ben Howe Rips Tea Party Film On Pages of BuzzFeed."

@jimmiebjr you won't read it because it's on BuzzFeed? And you wonder why we're labeled 'closed minded'.@benhowe
— Tracy Lee (@RememberComeNov) April 2, 2013

More from John Nolte, "An Open Offer to Ben Howe's Defenders."

Here's the BuzzFeed essay, "Another Terrible Conservative Movie."

Benjamin Millepied Will Be New Director of Paris Opera Ballet

An interesting piece at the New York Times, "Paris Opera Ballet Picks Outsider for New Director." I like this part:

Mr. Millepied will inherit one of the world’s greatest classical troupes. It has 150 dancers, a complex hierarchy of ranking and promotions and the sizable weight of history: the company is effectively an outgrowth of the very beginnings of ballet at the court of Louis XIV. Its dancers almost all come from the Paris Opera Ballet school, and they rarely leave to dance elsewhere once they have achieved a coveted position in the company.

They are also civil servants, with long-term contracts that run until their mandatory retirement, with pension, at 42. And with the notable exception of Ms. Lefèvre, directors tend to drop like flies at the Paris Opera. Even Rudolf Nureyev lasted only six stormy, if productive, years in the 1980s, while directors like John Taras and Violette Verdy managed just a few seasons.

The byzantine politics, scale and bureaucracy of the Paris Opera are worlds away from Mr. Millepied’s professional experience. He has long put together touring groups, and even at the peak of his dancing career was an indefatigable organizer of small choreographic projects and festivals with musicians and artists. He is a prolific choreographer who has created works for major companies (including American Ballet Theater, City Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet), and his public profile is high, thanks partly to his work on the Darren Aronofsky film “Black Swan” and his subsequent marriage to its star, Natalie Portman.

But his new company, the L.A. Dance Project, which made its debut in September in Los Angeles, is small and experimental in orientation. (Mr. Millepied said he planned to continue running the L.A. Dance Project until he began his new job, when he would move to Paris with Ms. Portman and their son. He said he hoped the company, which has a budget guaranteed for the next three years, would continue.)

“It is always a gamble,” Ms. Lefèvre said in a telephone interview. “I imagine people had something to say when I arrived. But he has a real artistic sensibility and an admirable curiosity. He will have to find his own way between innovation and the house traditions.”

Asked about making the transition from project-based director and choreographer to director of an institution as vast as the Paris Opera, Mr. Millepied smiled.

“I am not entirely a foreigner,” he said. “I did grow up in France, and even though I didn’t go to the school or dance with the Paris Opera Ballet, I absorbed similar ideas in my training. I understand the scale of a big company. I danced for one for almost 20 years. I think it’s an asset that I have absorbed other traditions and had other experiences in the U.S., which I can bring to the dancers here.” He added, “But of course I have a lot to learn about this company and its very remarkable and specific qualities.”

And speaking of Ms. Portman, see London's Daily Mail, "Is Natalie Portman quitting Hollywood? Actress's husband Benjamin Millepied accepts prestigious ballet job in Paris."

Sergei Filin, Bolshoi Ballet Director, Is Victim of Acid Attack

At the New York Times,"Harsh Light Falls on Bolshoi After Acid Attack":

MOSCOW — The stories about vengeance at the Bolshoi Ballet go back centuries: The rival who hid an alarm clock in the audience, timed to go off during Giselle’s mad scene, or who threw a dead cat onto the stage at curtain in lieu of flowers. There are whispers of needles inserted in costumes, to be discovered in midpirouette, or — the worst — broken glass nestled in the tip of a toeshoe.

But this ballet-loving city awoke on Friday to a special horror. A masked man had flung acid in the face of Sergei Filin, the artistic director of the Bolshoi, causing third-degree burns and severely damaging his eyes. Video from the hospital showed Mr. Filin’s head covered entirely in bandages, with openings for his eyes and mouth, his eyelids grossly swollen.

Though police officials said they were exploring theories including disputes over money, Mr. Filin’s colleagues at the Bolshoi said they suspected professional jealousy. In recent weeks Mr. Filin’s tires had been slashed, his car scratched, his two cellphones disabled, his personal e-mail account hacked and private correspondence published, according to Bolshoi officials. On the day of the acid attack, Mr. Filin had met with the Bolshoi’s general director, Anatoly Iksanov, and confided that he was beginning to worry about his children’s safety.

“Sergei told me that he had the feeling that he was on the front line,” Mr. Iksanov said at a news conference on Friday. “I told him, ‘Sergei, I’ve already been on the front line for the last two years, it is part of our profession, the profession of the leadership, so it’s normal.’ ” Then Mr. Iksanov paused. “No, no, it’s not normal,” he said.

Wow, I had no idea.

Continue reading.

Hugh Jackman Starved Himself of Food AND Water for His Most Gruelling Role Ever

At London's Daily Mail, "Making Les Mis? It was sheer misery!":

Hugh Jackman is part-way through a gruelling, 12-hour working day on the film Les Miserables, which comes hard on the heels of an equally gruelling three-hour stint in the gym that began shortly after dawn.

He has barely eaten for 36 hours and hasn’t drunk anything, not even water, during this period.

Little wonder that the normally bright-eyed and smiling Australian, star of films Wolverine, Real Steel and Van Helsing and an accomplished musical theatre actor, looks gaunt, with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes.

Hugh later apologises to those around him for his grumpiness but feels wholly justified the following morning when he sees the unedited version of the scene he was shooting the previous day. ‘I realised the sacrifices had been worth it, that the headaches, dizziness — and the grumpiness — had been a relatively small price to pay,’ says Hugh, who is cast as Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, the £38 million film version of one of the most successful stage musicals of all time.

Continue reading.

Memorization's Loosening Hold on Concert Tradition

I was in band in junior high. I played French horn. We had to memorize if we wanted to play, for both marching band and the holiday classical concert. It was a long time ago. But this story at the New York Times triggered the memory, "Playing by Heart, With or Without a Score":

It would seem that the filmmaker Michael Haneke, who wrote and directed the wrenching and poignantly acted new French movie “Amour,” is swept away by the mystique of a pianist, alone onstage, conveying mastery and utter oneness with music by playing a great piece from memory. The drama of playing from memory is at the crux of a scene involving the elegant French pianist Alexandre Tharaud, who, portraying himself, has a small but crucial role.

The story revolves around an elderly Parisian couple, Georges and Anne, retired music teachers, as they cope with the stroke that has paralyzed Anne’s right side. In one scene Mr. Tharaud, in the role of a former student of Anne’s who has gone on to a significant career, makes an unannounced visit to his old teacher to see how she is faring. He can barely contain his shock at her condition. Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) asks a favor: Would Alexandre play a piece she made him learn when he was 12? It is Beethoven’s Bagatelle in G minor, the second of the Six Bagatelles (Op. 126), Beethoven’s last published piano work.

At first Mr. Tharaud demurs. He has not played the piece for years, he explains, and is not sure he can remember it. Then, saying he will try, he proceeds to play the stormy bagatelle flawlessly, at least as much as we hear before the film cuts to the next scene. I suppose it would have been too pedestrian a touch if, when Alexandre said he was not sure he could remember the bagatelle, Anne had said, “Oh, I have the score, of course, right there on the shelf.”

Over the years I have observed that the rigid protocol in classical music whereby solo performers, especially pianists, are expected to play from memory seems finally, thank goodness, to be loosening its hold. What matters, or should matter, is the quality of the music making, not the means by which an artist renders a fine performance.

Increasingly, major pianists like Peter Serkin and Olli Mustonen have sometimes chosen to play a solo work using the printed score. The pianist Gilbert Kalish, best known as an exemplary chamber music performer and champion of contemporary music, has long played all repertory, including solo pieces (Haydn sonatas, Brahms intermezzos), using scores. As a faculty member of the excellent music department at Stony Brook University, Mr. Kalish spearheaded a change in the degree requirements in the 1980s, so that student pianists could play any work in their official recitals, from memory or not, whichever resulted in the best, most confident performance.

Yet there is still widespread and, to me, surprising, adherence in the field to the protocol of playing solo repertory from memory. This season Mr. Tharaud took a little flak for performing recitals in New York using printed scores.

Continue reading.

Romney Surging With Independent Voters

At Gateway Pundit, "Mitt Romney’s Surge With Independent Voters Is ‘Sharpest Tilt’ Since Reagan’s 1984 Landslide (Video)."

 And from Matt Towery, at LaGrange News, "“Dewey Defeats Truman,” Polls have fatal flaws that hidetrue Romney surge":

While this topic has been covered, it is now time to put real “meat on the bones” to explain why polling in this year’s presidential contest, not just nationally but in many of the battleground states, may be off when compared to the actual results.

Looking at a vast array of polls coming out just two weeks before the presidential election, critically important states such as Florida and Ohio appear to be close and anyone’s guess as to the final result. And while some national surveys, such as Gallup, have shown Republican nominee Mitt Romney running ahead of President Obama by several points, most have the race very tight, and a few have Obama leading. Let’s examine one poll, released as a series of continuing surveys by a large television network joining with a respected national newspaper.

This particular poll, conducted Oct. 17-20, has no intended bias, since it is conducted jointly by both a Republican- and a Democrat-oriented polling firm. But read on, and you will quickly realize how the old style of polling and the way many polls “weight” raw results may be setting us up for one of the biggest polling disasters since the infamous polling blunders that led to the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline blunder of 1948.

Consider the following, using the above-referenced survey as just an example of how many “big league” polls are conducted. Let’s look first at the questions asked of those who bother to answer the poll.

First, the poll has between 30 and 40 questions in it, depending on which questions a respondent is asked. Considering the fact that most questions take at least 30 seconds to read and some questions ask up to seven sub-questions, at bare minimum it takes 20 minutes to answer and more likely (just a guess) 30 minutes or more for some folks. So what hardworking, productive member of a family, taking care of a business, house or family, has time to spare for such an opus? Likely not the type that fits the profile of a Romney voter.

And it’s hard to imagine a modern and sane cellphone user staying on the line so long — but this poll includes 300 of them. Yeah, that fits my concept of cell users … not.

But let’s continue. This particular survey asks plenty of questions, such as whether the person answering the poll approves or disapproves of President Obama’s job performance and how they feel about both Obama and Romney.

The person responding to the poll has not only been trapped into opining on President Obama’s job approval, but their general “feelings” about the candidates. Now the “jury” is locked in by seemingly leading questions that they likely feel they must reflect when they are finally, several questions later, asked how they would vote for president.

So by the time the one question that will be at the top of ballots nationwide is reached, so many other positions and feelings have been expressed in taking the poll that many taking it might not utter the gut response that ultimately becomes a resolute vote.

Interestingly, in this particular survey, people seem to have much higher “positive or somewhat positive” feelings for the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. But later when they are asked which political party they would like to see control Congress, the split is nearly even.

Toward the end of the survey, we see that the percentage of individuals who identify themselves as “Strong Democrat” or “Strong Republican” is relatively low. More say they lean one direction or another or are independent and either lean toward one of the two parties or are just plain independent.

Many surveys being conducted not just nationally but in battleground states are weighted with a larger percentage of Democrat identified responses than Republican. And many, if not most, underrepresent the percent of voters who say they are independent.

That's pretty much it.

And if GOP enthusiasm lift's Romney's get-out-the-vote efforts over the Democrats, a lot of pro-'Bama poll watchers are in for a world of hurt. .

Leopold Museum in Vienna: 'Naked Man in Art'

At the Los Angeles Times, "'Nude Men' art exhibition in Austria sparks conversation."

Actually, it's not so much sparking "conversation" as controversy. There are giant-sized posters of nude men placed around the city --- even near elementary schools, which brought complaints from parents --- and right at the museum's entrance is a humongous poster of a man sprawling on his back nude, with his junk flopping out, prompting one commenter at a far-left homosexual blog to gasp, "'Imagine the size of his balls'."

The Times even posted a warning at the article, "The Leopold Museum is offering some of the artwork on its website. (Please note the images may be offensive for some readers.) "

You think?

But it's not just the monster-sized images of men in the buff that's disgusting --- placed next to schoolyards for maximum effect. The museum's collection includes photos of men engaged in homo sex acts. Here's the report at Fox News, "It's raining men: Vienna museum draws complaints for plastering city with male nude poster":

VIENNA – Naked men of all sizes and shapes are appearing on Vienna kiosks as a prestigious museum kicks off an exhibit of male nudity.

But outside the exhibition, organizers are being forced into cover-up mode after a storm of complaints that the ad posters are offensive.

In a show titled "Nude Men from 1800 to Today," the Leopold Museum opened its doors Friday to examine how artists have dealt with the theme of male nudity over the centuries.

"Mr. Big" — a four-meter (more than 12-foot) high full-frontal photo mounted on plywood and depicting a naked young man in an indolent sprawl — is set up near the show's entrance, lest there be any doubt what visitors are about to see.

Inside, around 300 art works are on display — including the controversial photograph that is raising the ire of Viennese. Created by French artists Pierre & Gilles, "Vive La France" shows three young, athletic men of different races wearing nothing but blue, white and red socks and soccer shoes. No visitors were complaining Friday as they filed past that photo and even more graphic examples of male nudity, including some depicted in sex acts.

"No complaints."

And why would there be? It's all so cool, homosexual sodomy as public art exhibitionism.

This is European progressivism run amok. And it's not like we don't have such perverse "art" in the U.S. --- the "Piss Christ" exhibit is all the rage among enlightened leftists, but let a filmmaker produce an anti-Muslim video trailer and the wrath of ages is brought down on the "blasphemy." It's pretty f-ked up.

UPDATE: Blazing Cat Fur links, hilariously, "Do You Find Naked Men Offensive?"

Mark Rothko Mural Defaced in Tate Modern gallery

Rothko's my favorite.

I saw this story the other day at Althouse.

Wagner in Israel: Promoting Anti-Semitism or Fighting Censorship?

From Professor Michael Curtis, at American Thinker:

Should the music of Wagner be played in Israel?

There is, in fact, an Israeli Wagnerian Society, but attempts to play the music -- by Zubin Mehta in 1981, by Daniel Barenboim in 2001, and most recently in June 2012 at Tel Aviv University -- have been opposed by groups in Israel. The TAU president stopped the private concert on his campus, arguing that it would offend the public, especially Holocaust survivors, of whom 200,000 remain alive in Israel.

Wagner was an unremitting anti-Semite, as shown both in his prose and in his music expression. His article Das Judenthum in der Musik (Jewishness in Music), written in 1850 under a pseudonym, is a strong criticism of the role of Jews in German culture and society in general, and a more personal attack on the composers of Jewish origin, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn, of whose success he was jealous.

More pertinent to the issue than his anti-Semitic writings is the fact that the music of Wagner and the persona of Wagner became linked with and embedded in Nazi propaganda. Hitler, at least in official pronouncements, spoke of the Wagnerian opus as the best expression of the German soul and in his Table Talk expressed admiration for Wagner. Indeed, the composer became a symbolic and even mythological figure in the Nazi regime, with its racial and genocidal anti-Semitism. Hitler had a special seat at the opera house in Bayreuth, which Wagner built. Recordings of Wagner's opera Rienzi usually opened the Nazi Party conferences.

The case of Wagner is unique. No one objects to hearing the music of Chopin, who disliked Jews and also made anti-Semitic utterances, though they were casual rather than virulent. The piece Carmina Burana by Carl Orff has been played in Israel, though Orff was close to the Nazi Party and obliged the Party by writing new incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream to replace the original music of Felix Mendelssohn, who had been banned as a Jewish composer. More difficult to assess politically was the pragmatic Richard Strauss, who was not a Nazi but who was president of the Reichsmusikkammer (German State Music Chamber), 1933-35, a period during which Jews were prevented from performing, and then president of the Nazi-controlled Permanent Council for the International Cooperation of Composers. The difference between these other composers and Wagner was not only the prominent use made of him in Nazi ideology but also the claim, which may be unfounded, that his music was played in Dachau and in the death camps to accompany the murders...

I can't imagine there'd be much of a market Wagner in Israel, in any case. But it's good to debate censorship. I say let the marketplace sort things out.

More at the link.

The Architecture of the Republican National Convention

An art review, interestingly, from Christopher Hawthorne, at the Los Angeles Times, "Party Crasher: The GOP Drew Inspiration From Frank Lloyd Wright for Its Stage Design, but An Unintended Message Might Be Sent":

Barack Obama had his Greek columns. Mitt Romney is turning to Frank Lloyd Wright.

When the Republican National Convention begins Monday inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum, a 19,500-seat arena in Tampa, Fla., that's home during hockey season to the NHL's Lightning, the stage will be crowded with large video screens framed in wood. Actually the "wood" will be made of vinyl and various laminates, but it'll read on television as cherry, mahogany and walnut.

The inspiration for the set, said Jim Fenhagen, lead production designer for the convention, is Wright's residential architecture, which often featured long horizontal bands of wood-framed windows.

The Wright references, which Fenhagen said he pulled together after a couple of simple Google searches, are relatively faint. They draw from the architect's most approachable domestic designs — mostly the Prairie Style houses of his early career — rather than his most radical buildings. They're more Oak Park than Fallingwater, more Robie House than Guggenheim Museum.

Still, in the context of a national political convention, where every symbolic choice is sure to be scrutinized, there are more than a few risks in going with Frank Lloyd Wright as your architectural touchstone. And I wonder how many of them the Romney campaign has fully considered.

Continue reading.