- John Stoehr
Arts Editor
There's more to art than you think. It's not just theater, paintings, books and dance. It's the enterprise of human creativity and it takes vastly different shapes and forms. Here you'll find my thoughts about the arts in Charleston and beyond. Neither of us knows what to expect.
Category Archives: Journal
Journal: A footnote to today’s Southern Avenger
December 12, 2007 – 8:04 am
I wrote this piece two Decembers ago when all the “War on Christmas” brouhaha was getting started thanks to John Gibson’s hysterical (both senses) book by the same name. As you’ll see, this so-called fight is nothing new in a pluralistic society such as ours. People from different backgrounds have had the tough task of [...]
Journal: File Under What Were They Thinking?
December 11, 2007 – 11:46 am
From The New York Times and Atlanta Journal-Constitution . . . —J.S.
The Atlanta Ballet is under investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration of the United States Department of Labor after a 17-year-old dancer wearing a panda costume fell about 12 feet into the orchestra pit last week during a performance of “The Nutcracker” [...]
Journal: NYC Critics Name No Country ’07’s Best
December 11, 2007 – 10:33 am
From the Associated Press (via ArtsJournal) . . . —J.S.
The Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” was named best picture Monday by the New York Film Critics Circle, further adding to the crime drama’s awards haul in the lead-up to the Oscars.
Joel and Ethan Coen also each won for their direction and screenplay adapted [...]
Journal: The Department of Duh
December 11, 2007 – 10:07 am
From the Hollywood Reporter (via ArtsJournal) . . . —J.S.
Four out of five TiVo and DVR owners use the technology to systematically skip all ads, research released Monday revealed.
Both TiVo and service provider DVR customers are just as likely to skip most commercials, according to the survey by ABI Research. It showed just how much [...]
Journal: Daniel Johnston’s inner demon
December 10, 2007 – 11:58 pm
From an article I wrote last summer for the Savannah Morning News about rock idol Daniel Johnston . . . —J.S.
I’ve been given the brushoff over the phone before, but never by a mad genius.
That, perhaps, is getting ahead of my story.
When I first learned Daniel Johnston was going to perform in Savannah, I had [...]
Journal: Toyota’s violin-playing robot
December 10, 2007 – 12:52 pm
From WIRED magazine’s Gadget Lab blog . . .
Toyota has demonstrated a range of new domestic robots aimed to help both the disabled and the busy home-maker. The wheelchair robot is notable because it looks like the head of an AT-ST Scout Walker, but the star is the violin playing model.
That it manages not to [...]
Journal: When orchestras come cheap
December 9, 2007 – 3:19 pm
I wrote this story a couple of years ago. It’s about orchestras being cheaper to import than to sustain in-house. That is, it was cheaper for residents of Savannah to hire a touring orchestra than to support its own orchestra, which went out of business in 2003. Given the situation in Jacksonville, where administrators and [...]
Journal: Karlheinz Stockhausen 1928-2007
December 9, 2007 – 9:31 am
From Friday’s Guardian newspaper in London . . .
Karlheinz Stockhausen, a controversial giant of 20th century musical modernism whose works were seldom embraced by mainstream concert audiences, has died at the age of 79, it was announced today.
Endlessly prolific, whether in fashion or out of it, he composed 362 works, including the world’s longest opera, [...]
Journal: Can Amazon’s Kindle save newspapers?
December 7, 2007 – 8:44 am
From Crosscut, a web-based news publication in Seattle, analyzing how newspapers could make money again given the emergence of a new kind of technology called the Kindle. Made by Amazon, the device would allow newspapers to continue doing what they have always done — that is, sell advertising in the traditional way, alongside editorial content. [...]
Journal: The Top 20 Books by the Village Voice
December 7, 2007 – 8:05 am
Here’s a sample of the Village Voice’s top pick of 2007 . . .
The Best of 2007
Voice writers pick their favorite 20 books of the year
December 4th, 2007 6:37 PM
All About H. Hatterr
by G.V. Desani
NYRB Books, 318 pp., $15.95
Imagine a schnockered Nabokov impersonating The Simpsons’ Apu while reeling off tales of an Anglo-Indian Don Quixote, [...]
