With the clock ticking down and the city girding itself in anticipation for the opening of the sadly named CenterStage performing arts center, two local bloggers have hit the Internet with competing posts worthy of Brutus and Mark Antony (Shakespeare, not pop music, kids).
Save Richmond seized a predictable opening with news this weekend that former Times-Dispatch columnist Roy Proctor had a parting of ways with CenterStage over the content of a coffee table book he had been commissioned to write. Originally slated to find itself wrapped by the chimney with care this Christmas, the book will have to find itself another author.
Will Jones at the Times-Dispatch broke the news -- if a former reporter and a PR hungry arts center doing a piss-poor job at contracting over work, and utterly misunderstanding why they might have totally different agendas is news:
"I could not possibly have adhered to those
things because I would have been falsifying history on a monumental
scale," said Proctor, who retired in 2004 as an arts writer and critic
for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Foundation officials insisted they are not trying to rewrite history
but said the draft was too much a summary of newspaper articles and
void of the anecdotes of performers and shows that had been part of the
initial pitch for the book project last summer. Proctor said he
considered conducting extensive interviews but decided to work largely
from newspaper clippings.
"We are not trying to falsify history, change it," foundation
spokesman Jay Smith said. "We felt the manuscript provided was
incomplete" and inappropriate for a keepsake book.
"We didn't hire him as a journalist," foundation board member Susan Fitz-Hugh added. "We hired him as an author."
This was prime fodder for Save Richmond which quickly hit the Internet with a "Can't Rewrite History" post (more a culling of Jones' TD piece) that captures the essence of some of the anti-CenterStage vitriol out there:
How going about things the
wrong way can poison what may have started out as a noble effort.
Critics of CenterStage are not against the arts or kids or old people
or sunshine, but rather how the Foundation’s leadership have comported
themselves and wasted public money.
Save Richmond's Don Harrison has been tireless in his documentation of the countless times the CenterStage (formerly Performing Arts Center) project has stumbled in recent years -- pricked by countless self-inflicted wounds along the way.
Sadly, Proctor was hired to write a fluff piece, not a critical history.
Style Weekly's Jason Roop captured the essense of the CenterStage fumbles in a series of Twitter posts over the weekend (@StyleWeekly had a lively exchange about the Proctor gaffe with @aarondotson, @sarvay, @jonnewman and @LaDIFF this past Saturday):
@LaDIFF @sarvay @aaronsdotson How is it not news? This was a major project the foundation planned and pitched stories to media about! 10:48 AM Aug 8th from TweetDeck
@LaDIFF @sarvay @aaronsdotson Plus, now there's no book to go along with the opening. It's an embarrassing botched project. 10:50 AM Aug 8th from TweetDeck
@LaDIFF @sarvay @aaronsdotson If that's not news, how about there's no executive or artistic director or full season 30 days b4 opening? 10:51 AM Aug 8th from TweetDeck
Leave it to the new blogger on the street to throw his body in front of the speeding train of criticism. One Way Richmond got its cultural angst on last night with a lengthy, sometimes rambling, and occasionally pointed post defending CenterStage, "Fuck culture, I've got comic books":
When folks say 98% of Richmond will not support it, I suddenly remember
folks saying 99% of Richmond will not support The National. Um, The
National is on a roll. Sell out after sell out after sell out. Remember
when ‘they’ said nobody will come down to ‘First Fridays.’ Oh the
laughter. Richmonders are still gun shy about Six Street Market Place.
I get it. But I live downtown. It is a new day down here folks. Using
parking, black people, or the fact it’s to expensive as excuses just
doesn’t cut it anymore.
The Performing Arts Center has had it’s
issues. Of course it has. What do you expect from something conjured up
by Doug Wilder a.k.a Thug Wilder. The meals/sales tax put on local
restaurants in order to pay for this site was unfair. I am simply
arguing the fact that now that it’s built, it will succeed. Everyone,
including detractors has stated how beautiful the site is, and how well
the site meshes the new with the history.
Now that "Serious Fun" is almost upon us, it looks like the proof may well be in the pudding. If they eat pudding at the opera.
(I'll be scurrying around backstage at the end of the month getting a behind-the-scenes tour of CenterStage. Keep an eye out for a snarky, but honest, appraisal of what your meals tax has purchased for Richmond.)
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