One Canuck's Radio Weblog

  Wednesday, 3 July 2002

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Where has the competition gone? , Norman Lebrecht, 7/3/2002 [La Scena Musicale - News] 'Competitions are a Faustian pact that music made with mass media. To arrest its drift to the cultural fringe, classical music offered television a gladiatorial spectacle and television, anxious to seem cultured, presented music as bloodsport to the exclusion of any other forms of musical performance.

But should the world refuse to pay attention - as it did at the Tchaikovsky - television will turn elsewhere and the concert hall will lose its last mass-audience outlet. Don't ask who won the Tchaikovsky last week. The loser was the future of classical music.'

I love Lebrecht's articles, including this one. But I have to wonder if in this case he's wanting it both ways.

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Nasty stuff.

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That's 'the road'. Singular. I love this country.

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Yikes. What a pile of blather. I tried to read it but the guy can't write. Sorry. Next!

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Speculation as to why: waiting until they're older; higher unemployment rates; and this surprising (to me) item: '# Canadians tend to use better contraceptive methods [^] more than eight in 10 Canadians opt for birth control pills but only one in six American women do'. Who knew?! Clearly (in my mind) this is the real reason.

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-- After years of frustrating snags and political disappointments, building the new Canadian Opera House is now possible. There's public and private money, there's land in Toronto's downtown and there's a company edgy enough to take on Atom Egoyan's rethinking of Salome. You'd think that the Canadian Opera Company could want for nothing more. Except that the design for its new house is missing a compelling libretto.  FULL STORY [The Globe and Mail: Arts] 'The design architect Jack Diamond -- traumatized like the city's cultural impresarios by the huge acoustical mistake of Roy Thomson Hall -- has focused his energy on getting the sound right for the hall and less on the building's total architectural vision.'

Good God. It's an oopera house! Not some architec's hard on. Finally a music venue with the focus in the right place.

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TORONTO -- Bob Dylan bought his flat-top Gibson and started singing folk music after hearing an Odetta record. Legend has it Janis Joplin first tried on her bluesy ways at a party by imitating Odetta's voice. Writer Maya Angelou claims that if we knew ''a voice and soul like Odetta's'' would come along every 50 years or so, time would ''pass quickly and painlessly.'' And singers as diverse as Tracy Chapman, Cassandra Wilson and Jewel have all cited her as an influence.  FULL STORY [The Globe and Mail: Arts]

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Mark Hall (former editor of MacWEEK) has written several articles for Computerworld about Mac OS X and XServe in the "Information Technology" market:

• Enterprises Eye Mac OS X
• Mac OS X as Preventive Medicine
• XServe Grabs the Spotlight

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Just an update on my order for FileMaker Pro. We received version 6 via FedEx this morning, though FileMaker's web site still shows 5.5.

[FileMaker Pro 6 apparently includes XML import and export, security improvements, and support for special features under Mac OS X, such as importing pictures from digital cameras. -MacInTouch]

Of course we've just purchased 5.5 and I literally installed it last night. I assume there'll be a free upgrade for those of us who bought the old version this close to the new release.

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A rather rambling letter from a semi-pro. But a very happy, satisfied customer.

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Throw this guy in jail now! Truly a menace to soicety.

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Just as blogs are the cure for integrity outages at the BigPubs, LittleCo's will be our haven from the excesses of the idiots who run the BigCo's. Microbusinesses and microcontent.   [Scripting News]

Part of a larger - and worthwhile - rant from Dave. But I want to focus right here. The revolution's been under way for a while and the now's the time for the micros.