Here's To Anita!

Berlin in the "roaring twenties" was a city of drugs, sex and art. More than one third of its population were less than 30 years old. The survivors of the war enjoyed life, and life was regarded an art. Ten years after the prude "Kaiserreich" the experience of the bloody battle fields and the collapse of the old order had swept away all inhibitions among the city's avant-garde. All kinds of drugs were offered in Berlin's dark night clubs where stark naked girls entertained the rich, the young and the crazy. And a new type of women took the stage: The unabashed lesbians. Her protagonist was a dancer called Anita Berber. She performed in the nude, but regarded herself as an artist and did not accept vulgar comments from tipsy guests. On one occasion she interrupted her dance number, grabbed a bottle from one of the bistro tables and crashed it on the head of a man who had yelled an obscene remark. Anita had loved a great number of generous gentlemen, sexy girls and many pounds of cocaine when, only 29, she died shortly before Berlin's crazy Twenties came to a sudden end.

Sign

If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.

Woody Allen

Prime Music, Not Prime For Authors

Amazon introduced a music streaming feature on Thursday called Prime Music. It gives subscribers to its Prime service access to thousands of songs free and without interruptions from advertising. What will the authors get for the use of their copyrights? That's still totally unknown. Amazon offered the record companies a royalty pool, to be divided by a market-share formula of Amazon’s choosing. Sony and Warner Music have signed such deals. Universal, whose catalog includes stars like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Kanye West, did not reach an agreement with Amazon. After contracts for songwriting rights were rejected by many music publishers, Amazon used an outside firm to obtain “compulsory” licenses through federal copyright provisions. Prime Music is not seen as a major threat to companies like Spotify, Rhapsody and Beats Music. But Amazon’s sheer size gives it a big advantage.

Marie Antoinette Never Said This

Marie Antoinette never actually uttered the words Let them eat cake. Though historians have known better all along, it is still popularly believed that Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI and queen of France on the eve of the French Revolution, uttered the insensitive remark upon hearing peasants' complaints that there wasn't enough bread to go around: "Let them eat cake," she supposedly said. It's simply not true. It was a callous and ignorant statement and Marie Antoinette was neither. I could not ignore that famous sentence Writing a musical about Marie Antoinette, but I let it say by someone of her entourage

An Honest Word About Fame

"If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically."

Jean-Paul Sartre

Sinatra Is Still #1

The most important person in the English-language world is Frank Sinatra, according to an analysis of Wikipedia articles led by the University of Toulouse's Young-Ho Eom. Number two is Michael Jackson, and number three is Pope Pius XII. Eom arrived at this somewhat surprising conclusion by using methods borrowed from Google to analyze Wikipedia pages and determine which individuals have the most important articles linking to them. Taking all 24 major language editions of Wikipedia into account, Eom's team carried out the same study and came to a more plausible conclusion: Adolf Hitler. (Even then, Michael Jackson takes the second slot, and Madonna is in third place.) The point of the study wasn't strictly to determine who the most important people are on Wikipedia, but instead to discover if the online encyclopaedia was skewed in the level of attention it gives to various figures, either by gender, time, or location.

Best Score, But Not Best Musical

A musical score is at the heart of what separates a Broadway musical from a Broadway play—or so it would seem. How, then, is it possible for one show to win Best Score, as The Bridges of Madison County did June 8, but not be named Best Musical—an award that went to A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder? In this year’s case, voters didn’t have a chance to give Best Musical to Bridges, as it was not nominated in that category, a rare, but not unprecedented occurrence for a Best Score winner. A similar situation happened in 2000, when the Elton John musical Aida won for Best Score, but was not nominated for Best Musical. The top honor went to Contact, a dance musical that used a pre-recorded score of existing musical material. 

Seoul Welcomes Mozart! Again

The Sejong Center in Seoul/South Korea is the largest theater I've seen so far. It seats 3000 people. Nevertheless it still feels like a theater, not like a concert hall. After four successful years, the initial Korean production of the musical Mozart!, created by Sylvester and me more than 15 years ago, has received a face lift. The new version will have its opening night today at this spectacular venue.

Willie's Therapy

"When you're singing, you're using extra muscles, and it requires a lot of exercise and breathing. You can't do that if you're a sissy. If I have any fitness advice for people, I'd tell them to sing more. It's good therapy, too."

Willie Nelson

Willie's Home

The entertainer Willie Nelson has a ranch in Texas and a residence in Hawaii, but the place that he calls home is a bus named Honeysuckle Rose. Joe Nick Patoski, in an interview for his 2008 biography, “Willie Nelson: An Epic Life,” asked Mr. Nelson where he considers home. “We were on his bus,” Mr. Patoski said. “He just pointed to the table, to say definitively that this — the bus — was home.”
Even when he is at his ranch in Spicewood, Tex., Mr. Nelson is said to often sleep on the bus, which is where he frequently engages in what he calls “adjusting his personality” — or smoking marijuana.