Recently by Sasha Anawalt

You heard it here folks, if you haven't heard it already.

USC Annenberg School for Communication is taking the audacious leap (because what other kind is ever worth taking?) and launching a nine-month Master's Program in ARTS JOURNALISM, as part of the new Specialized Journalism series.

The faculty is led by Tim Page, who until recently was the chief  music critic at the Washington Post and who earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his "lucid and illuminating" music criticism. He's also written widely on film and literature for the Post and other publications. He's a fabulous teacher, if I dare say, and I have totally loved working with him to put this program together.

I'm also on the faculty. So, full disclosure: everything I write about this program is loaded with enthusiasm for it. We are working in dynamic partnership with USC's five arts schools (Cinematic Arts, Theatre, Architecture, Fine Arts and Music). The curriculum straddles the Journalism School and these five schools. What we're hoping is that students will exit the program pumped up with maximum integrity on digital media skills, entrepreneurial savvy and business tools, solid arts backgrounds and good -- really good -- journalism.

The deadline for applications is July 1, 2008. The program begins on August 11 and is open to mid-career arts journalists, recent graduates holding bachelors in journalism or the arts, and to artists. The mix of people and experiential nature of the program's thrust  -- getting out into Los Angeles and behind-the-scene at artists' studios, into places known and unknown, mainstream and grassroots, for one-on-one encounters with arts and artists -- distinguishes this Master's program

Students will also participate in workshops, seminars and performances offered through USC Annenberg's established fellowship programs, the Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship in November and the NEA Institute in Theater and Musical Theater in April '09.

If you want more info, send me a comment or write to the Assistant Dean of Admissions, Allyson Hill allysonh@usc.edu

This eyeopening, mindblowing info-loaded video, Did You Know 2.0,  is a good and vital tool that's making the rounds of professional journalism seminars on digital media. 

Have you ever heard the term "unmediated media"?

I hadn't until the Re/Covering Islam seminar at USC Annenberg on Friday, which really had nothing to do with the arts, but plenty to do with how Muslim culture and news is covered by the press. In his astute closing remarks, Professor Philip Seib -- who wrote The Global Journalist: News and Conscience in a World of Conflict -- used it to characterize the globalized discourse that's happening on the Web and giving us an unprecedented possibility for greater cultural cohesion.

I took him to mean by "unmediated media" the unedited posts by journalists and ordinary people contributing to the digital media explosion without mediation or editing. This started a scribbling, musing word-stacking game in my mind that went something like this:

If unmediated media is unedited media, then editors are mediators.

un-MEDIA-ted

to MEDIA-te

to MEDIA te

2 MEDIA te

2 MEDI 8

m EDItor = editor = mediator

Editors are very much needed for the practice of good journalism on the Internet. But they are a rarity. Perhaps we can create a new title for them that references digital media by calling them mediators. I don't know. What do you think? We'll design the business model later to pay them...the floor is open for discussion.

(The image is of a globe called WORK TOGETHER by artist Rion Stassi; www.coolglobes.com)

Jordi Ortega, USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellow in 2003, helped turn print into electronic pay dirt for a 2003 start-up independent tabloid, Latino Weekly, based in Los Angeles. And today it was announced that Latino Weekly''s electronic spin-off http://www.elatinoweekly.com/ (for which Ortega is video editor) is entering a global content partnership with Wizzard Media that will result in eLatino moving into broadcast. Articles in The Weekly and eLatinoweekly not only stress arts and entertainment, but they are published in English and Spanish.

Here's a quote you can take to the bank from the Wizzard Media press release:

The Latino market is poised for significant growth over the next two years. Recent in-house marketing research compiled by www.elatinoweekly.com shows that the U.S. Hispanic market is expected to reach purchasing power in the trillions of dollars by 2010. With almost 50% of U.S. Latinos under the age of 27, twice as many of them are moviegoers compared to any other population segment in the nation. In addition, 56% of U.S. based Latinos, 21% of South Americans and 18% in Central Americans are web users.

Get that Replay Finger ready! I promise you."Begin the Beguine" from Broadway Melody, Armenian music by Harout Pamboujian (no relation to Cole Porter). Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell as never, ever before seen.

So

What do you think of the Jeff Koons's Tulips? Too late.

They are going away. Victims of abuse. (These things are way bigger than you are, so I am not talking dirty, felonious abuse not matter how much the tulips look like something else.) I am also not breaking any news here. Suzanne Muchnic at the Los Angeles Times did. She produced a model, Class A arts report about art in public places and the rights people feel they have about touching, sitting upon and doing group shots in front of art that's unguarded and placed where it cries to be touched, sat upon and turned into a family Christmas card.

On Sunday, Koons's Tulips were, I don't want to say heavily guarded, because in this day and age when kalishnikovs or reasonable facsimiles are commonplace, a couple of guards with shiny badges and four ropes is not a big deal. BUT Tulips was surrounded this weekend like a President's coffin lying in state at the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM). I wanted to see them before they are whisked away later this week probably forever.

They are magnificent beauties. They make the plaza at BCAM, bookended by Chris Burden's Urban Light -- worth a trip to LA, I'm telling you -- and Charles Ray's Firetruck, which is also being removed from the site. Take a glimpse:

If and when you ever get the great, good privilege to be a critic, for god sakes, know -- if you can -- the generation ahead of you. Critics are the thoroughbreds of the newsroom. But there ain't no newsroom no more, and so, with the advance of technology, we say good bye to Deborah Jowitt at the Village Voice, perhaps a victim of print journalisms' inability to comprehend the deep need within this Youth Generation to take stock, be real, see what's in front of their eyes and go to dance.

I am not talking platitudes. I am talking straight.

Once we leave the consumerist, mainstream stupid world that persists and persists in persisting (please let us get out of that as soon as we can, and I am not preaching Obama. I am just saying that we need to live a little and breathe and know our flesh, which is tantamount to preaching Obama and, forgive me, knowing dance), we find real human beings. Deborah Jowitt -- who was recently "fired" (I quote my colleague Jeff Weinstein, because, lord knows, has the press written about this since yesterday, though the blogs be blogging, and when oh when will bloggers be considered press? Yesterday, like yesterday?) -- Jowitt taught me that you never look at your pad.

She took minimal notes. And yet -- remark upon this -- she is the best descriptor of dance around. She let herself be absorbed, see what the choreographer (artist) wanted her to see at the time, in the moment, for you, now.  If you want to find out what a dance actually looked like, I mean, what happened in it then, read Jowitt.

She is a historian's best friend. My gratitude, Ms. Jowitt.

Your departure means much. 

Around the campfire at The Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood, this news whispered round: Kurt Andersen is coming to town. What does that mean for us here in L.A.?  Big fun. Big, big fun. Who doesn't want their city explored, studied, observed, savored like a fresh-plucked-berry sorbet and presumably digested by Andersen, oh he of "Studio 360" and "SPY" magazine and the novels, the novels -- "Heyday" and "Turn of the Century"? Fools, only fools, I tell you.

So what's he going to do here? And when?

For a hundred days, from January to April of 2009, Andersen takes position at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. "My title is (mega-embarassingly) 'visionary in residence,'" he wrote a couple of days post-campfire (where he was not).

The backstory to this appointment, in brief, is that Richard Koshalek, president of Art Center -- and uber-magnet for intellectual brilliance -- knows that Andersen possesses a deep, abiding appreciation for good design. Things that work and understanding the history of systems, whether they be social or architectural or political, fascinate Andersen. His almost boyish curiosity (the mark of a true journalist) and willingness to try almost anything (save do-goody-ness for pious, vapid reasons under the guise of ART) make him an ideal teacher. He is a contextualizer, which means he can't help but see things that might and could and should happen. He's got the vision. So, his title is rather apt.

What I want to do right now is refer you to Very Short List, an Andersen production -- or something...he has some connection to it..and I'll get back to you with what. Duty demands that as an arts reporter, you serve yourself and constituency well by checking into VSL regularly. (Play around on it. Find Newseum for a newsie's field day.)

Yesterday, VSL featured this witty, seering, superbly crafted "Food Fight" YouTube video http://youtube.com/watch?v=e-yldqNkGfo  It diagrams American involvement in war -- and the fall of the Twin Towers comes as a jolt (as if that could ever still happen to our nervous systems).

What Andersen is capable of in L.A., time will tell. But I am sure he'll find stories the rest of us haven't. 

Just watched Penn Jillette low ball it on "Dancing with the Stars" with Kym. He tried illusion on the judges and it almost worked, sort of. I know that's redundant, but Jillette may be one of the few "from the other side" in the business (no matter how famous he is, his origins --authentic, off-B'way, 99 -seat theater or less -- stick) who would venture into this commercial TV show and retain his hip.

I'm a huge fan of the TV dance shows, especially "So You Think You Can Dance" in part because they teach critical skills through subterfuge. And, in other part, because they seriously promote choreographers. Those judges can be tough and very often they are right. Save for Debbie Allen, who is so loaded with pomposity and 'tude she registers as nothing but false and massively egotistical. She can't judge without plugging her LA studio. There is something to be learned from that about what NOT TO DO. About the separation between advertising and editorial.

But I digress...Penn Jillette and "Dancing with the Stars"...last week The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner held a reunion. Her-Ex theater critic Jack Viertel "discovered" Penn & Teller. I know he did. I remember him returning to the office -- ahhh the days when we critics wrote in the office around communal pillars on computers the size of carry-on luggage, reading our ledes aloud, smoking cigarettes and editing each other's copy in ink on cog-marked, green and white striped printout paper.

(For the most incisive nostalgic report on the Her-Ex old days, see John Schwada's Reunion blog for Fox News Channel 11. He captures the Herald perfectly -- and why so many true blue die hard reporters and critics came out of there. And why this was journalism in all its romantic glory.)

But on one of those days, Jack Viertel returned beside himself over Penn & Teller. The rest is history, and Jack got it. Critics meant something then. They still can and do. It just takes guts. By which I mean listening to your gut.

Choreographers on TV and film have always been a big deal inside the circle of Those Who Care, but something is happening right now that is different and monumental and we ought to pay attention. "So You Think You Can Dance" will start up soon (the search for the next Top 20 began on March 1 in NYC).

The only thing missing from most of its contenders is ballet. Perhaps the only reason ballet should exist right now is because it provides (still) the best training a human dance body can get. The choreographers on the show don't come from ballet, but they value it. They value good movement, period. (Mia Michaels often scrapes emotions raw, a good thing, to my mind, and exceptional on television.)

As a result, it's impossible as a dance-lover not to value them, the choreographers. They give the contestants new works, often in styles that are alien, each week. To see those kids perform -- I mean, think if, on "American Idol," the singers didn't get to choose their songs but had to sing something completely original each week -- is to see budding artists on the line. The choreographers reign.

In acknowledgment of the ascendancy of the on-camera choreographers...If you are one, you may want to submit your work for a Choreography Media Honor. Go to www.dancecamerawest.org for a submission form. The 2nd annual CMHs will be held on June 13 at the Directors Guild of America (DGA in Hollywood). A potentially fabulous opportunity to see a lot of film and/or TV work by choreographic talent known and unknown. For tickets, contact Teresa Taylor at teresa.taylor@mac.com.