Monthly Archives: September 2006

Pelli’s $200M Orange County Work

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Overture’s architect, Cesar Pelli recently completed the $200M Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. Christopher Hawthorne:

At age 79, the Argentine-born, Connecticut-based architect Cesar Pelli is inevitably described in newspaper and magazine profiles these days as diplomatic and genteel. In his design for the $200-million Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, which opens Friday night, he and his firm have produced a building that brings the very same adjectives to mind. In other words, if you are optimistic enough to believe that classical music — or architecture, for that matter — is an evolving art form with the capacity to provoke as well as merely soothe, you will likely find it enormously disappointing.


The 250,000-square-foot building, which work crews have been racing to prepare for Friday night’s performance by the Pacific Symphony, resembles a high-end hotel lobby or a luxury-car showroom, spaces in which every visible surface is used to promote a buttery handsomeness. Its undulating glass façade wraps gently around a foyer lined with white Spanish granite floors and rich yellow-beige carpeting, and topped with a glimmering silver-leaf ceiling. Beyond that is the auditorium, a stately, old-world and surprisingly tall room with 2,000 seats upholstered in deep red velvet.

Lots of similarities to our State Street building. More photos here.

Go, Fish! Muskie Love, New Wisconsin-Set Musical, Begins Sept. 20 in Madison

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Kenneth Jones:

In Wisconsin, where audiences like their new musicals quirky and with lots of local color, Madison Repertory Theatre opens its season Sept. 20 with Muskie Love — a rare musical named after a freshwater game fish.

Don’t discount the show. After all, this is the same state where the ice-fishing comedy Guys on Ice and the great-outdoors comedy Lumberjacks in Love were smasheroos.

Muskie Love opens Sept. 22. Performances continue to Oct. 15, in The Playhouse at the Overture Center for the Arts.

Loosely based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing “is a home grown Wisconsin delight” by the winners of the Richard Rodgers Award, Dave Hudson and Paul Libman, featuring Doug Mancheski and Lee Becker from Madison Repertory Theatre’s earlier Guys on Ice (which was also a hit at Milwaukee Repertory Theatre).

The Rep has a great deal for first time subscribers.

Noting Sarah Ruhl’s MacArthur Fellowship

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Madison Rep Artistic Director Rick Corley:

Dear Folks: It was a delight to awaken this morning to the news that Sarah Ruhl was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. These awards are in the amount of $500,000 – one hundred thousand for each year of five years. Sarah is the only playwright to receive the award this year. For new staff and board members, we at Madison Repertory Theatre can take pride in giving Sarah her very first professional production when we produced EURYDICE four years ago. Since then Sarah’s plays have gone on to major productions in Seattle, Atlanta, Berkeley, Chicago, New Haven, and many, many other cities.

This fall her Pulitzer-finalist play, THE CLEAN HOUSE, will have its New York premiere at Lincoln Center Theatre, and there is talk of EURYDICE appearing in New York as well. Bravo, Sarah! And congratulations to all of you who support the Madison New Play Festival and the development of new work. Sarah’s success is a tribute to you.

Grove on the HP Morass

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Tom Foremski:

“Every time I see that a company that has departed from the … combined chairman-chief executive role go back” to combining the roles, Grove said, “I’m sorry to see that.”


. . . HP had split the roles of chairwoman and chief executive in February 2005, when Carly Fiorina was ousted by the board.


. . . Grove was in New York to speak at the Grove School of Engineering at the City College of New York. The school was named after Grove, following his $26 million donation to the school last year, the largest ever to the school.

RFID Tags in Your Passport

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Bruce Schneier:

If you have a passport, now is the time to renew it — even if it’s not set to expire anytime soon. If you don’t have a passport and think you might need one, now is the time to get it. In many countries, including the United States, passports will soon be equipped with RFID chips. And you don’t want one of these chips in your passport.
RFID stands for “radio-frequency identification.” Passports with RFID chips store an electronic copy of the passport information: your name, a digitized picture, etc. And in the future, the chip might store fingerprints or digital visas from various countries.

Dancing on the Packers Grave

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Queueing up for a flight through Chicago recently, I stood behind three well dressed Bear fans. It was a rather long queue – about 30 minutes. The fans reveled in last Sunday’s shutout and hatched plans to obtain tickets, flights and lodging for February 4, 2007 in Miami – site of the 2007 Super Bowl.

Hubris.

Perhaps premature….. They also mentioned that the Bears were the last team to shut out the Packers in 1991….

For many, Sundays are now wide open. One wonders if the Pack will fall to the depths of the Bart Starr and Forrest Gregg era?

Earmark Reform: Baldwin Votes No

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Interesting spin on this vote:

We are blowing away the fog of anonymity,” said Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Rules Committee. “The goal is to pull back the curtain on earmarks to the public.”

The rule change shelves a wider ethics bill, however, at least until next year. That bill became bogged down amid disagreements between the House and the Senate, and the reluctance of lawmakers from both parties to limit their interactions with lobbyists. The earmarks measure was brought up as a passable way to address voter unrest over the scandals, aides said.

“This bill represents the death of lobby reform,” said Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), a former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

Madison’s representative Tammy Baldwin voted No. Obey’s comments are ironic, given his prolific use of earmarks. Lots more on earmarks here.

I don’t think there’s much to be proud of from either party’s perspective. Applying some “sunshine” to the earmark process is a good thing.

AT&T – More Marketing, No Fiber to the Home

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Rick Romell:

Opening a new front in its battle with cable companies for the country’s Internet, telephone and television customers, AT&T Inc. on Tuesday started selling Web-based TV service.

For $19.99 a month, the telecommunications firm is offering about 20 channels over the Internet, with the promise of more soon. The service is available to anyone with a high-speed, or broadband, Internet connection – wired or wireless.

The rollout is “an example of how we’re trying to evolve into an entertainment company,” said Sarah Silva, Milwaukee-area spokeswoman for AT&T.

Drunk on Earmarks: Obey’s $6.9M in ONE Bill!

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Wall Street Journal:

A case in point is the HHS-Education spending bill, which so far contains 1,867 earmarks at a cost of just under $500 million. Members tell us the bill has caused a mini-rebellion because two of the three largest earmarkers are Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who walks away with $7.9 million worth of goodies, and David Obey, the ranking Democrat on Appropriations who receives $6.8 million for his Wisconsin district. This is the same Ms. Pelosi who earlier this session pledged to give up her pork to help balance the budget.

The House GOP leadership finally seems to comprehend the stakes in this pre-election budget fight. Majority Leader John Boehner calls the anti-earmarking bill “must-pass legislation,” and has agreed to separate it from a bottled-up lobbying-reform bill. All that can block this from passing now are the spend-happy Republicans on Appropriations. If they succeed, they will have inflicted a far greater wound on their majority than the Democrats ever could.

I’ve not heard back from Tammy Baldwin regarding her views on earmarks [see “Spreading the Love“].

Robert Reich says earmarks must go:

The number of registered lobbyists in Washington has ballooned to the point there are over 60 of them for every single member of Congress. And they spent $2.4 billion last year. What do you think the lobbyists bought with that money?

A lot of it’s called “earmarks” — special spending that’s stuck into pieces of legislation to benefit particular constituents, like that Alaskan bridge to nowhere in last year’s highway bill, and the special casino licenses that got lobbyist Jack Abramoff into trouble.

Ten years ago there were about 3,000 earmarks. Last year there were over 14,000, costing taxpayers over $47 billion according to the Congressional Research Service.

Last January, after the Jack Abramoff scandal had spread to staffers of former House Whip Tom DeLay and Ohio Republican Bob Ney, and after FBI agents found an unexplained $90,000 cash in the freezer of Louisiana Democrat William Jefferson, and after former California Republican Duke Cunningham pleaded guilty to bribery — after all that — it seemed like the House was so embarrassed it would clean itself up. At least that’s what Speaker Dennis Hastert promised.