Fame or Famine

A little bit of live singing from across the globe: we don’t get to hear much of the fine arts from North Korea, but I found this particular YouTube Video strangely compelling as the lovely waitress sang.

As part of the blog off, I think this is a good example of the value of the fine arts. In spite of all our differences, and not knowing anything about what she’s singing – it’s beautiful. It touches me. It means that there is something inside of us all that brings us to a common place.
We need more fine artists in politics, …read more

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I swear, I couldn’t make this stuff up.
In the category of “stage to screen” I could probably somewhat justify Al Gore’s famous slideshow, An Inconvenient Truth. After all, it went on to become not just a book but also a Nobel-Peace-Prize winning movie. Well, ok, Mr. Gore got the prize, but it wasn’t for his work as V.P.
Turning It Up to Eleven
Now, however, it’s going the other way, as Giorgio Battistelli of Milan’s La Scala opera house is going to undertake to turn it into an opera, set to debut in 2011. Yes, that’s right, an opera about global warming.
Battistelli …read more

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This was going to be an entry about Janine Jansen, the virtuoso violinist reviewed in this article. I was excited by the fact that she seems to be leveraging the power of the web (“…downloads count for 75% of my Vivaldi recording’s sales.”) into supporting her career.
Then this statement caught my eye:
“…while Jansen won’t make a prurient spectacle of herself, we’re reminded that she could (and pull it off, visually, like Mae did) if she wanted to.”
This is apparently in comparison to Vanessa Mae, another concert violinist who has the audacity to blatantly take advantage of the fact that she …read more

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