According to Sequenza 21, a mini-movement of art funding is happening beneath the surface of the debates over government versus corporate sponsorship. Small orchestras are pooling their resources to collectively commission pieces by contemporary composers, in the way that big groups in New York or Boston or San Francisco do fairly routinely.

Apparently pianist Jeffrey Biegel is leading the charge in this regard, serving as a kind of artistic dealmaker.

Is it working? A new work by composer Joan Tower, initially comissioned by 65 small orchestras and later given new impetus by Ford sponsorship, has been played more than 80 times, and is being released by Naxos. It’s not stylistically ground-breaking work (“It’s not Ligeti but you knew that,” writes S21′s blogger), but getting orchestras to play modern work at all is a worthwhile cause.

I wonder if this model could work in other fields. I suppose movies are routinely collectively financed, with angel investors that rarely see their money back. Novels are almost always a labor of personal love, although grants do help. Maybe online reading groups could form what would essentially be their own micro-publishing houses, give authors community-chest advances, sponsor writing retreats, as long as they owned (like a publisher) some share in the final work.

I am a sucker for any way to finance creative endeavors that doesn’t require giving a large corporation the sole copyright, and doesn’t lead to poverty.

Granted, Lordi’s a hard act to follow. A battle axe that shoots little flames, and devil wings that come out (a little creakily, granted) right there on stage. Yeah, baby. But this year’s Eurovision just didn’t have that hummable, wtf, is that Gwar?! factor?

But, ok, it had a large Ukrainian man of extremely ambiguous sexuality with a tin-foil skullcap and an ironic Soviet star on his head, singing German numbers not really in the traditional order, and then telling Russia to piss off. I think. And a bunch of glam rockers of equally ambiguous sexuality from Sweden, which, if only they’d rocked a little harder they coulda been something big, instead of just kind of appealingly swishy.

The real baffler, and maybe it’s a secret Rorschach-like thing, is the Serbians, a small, squat woman with a fabulous voice, and what seemed to be the extras from Charlie’s Angels behind her, dancers, except they weren’t dancing, only their hair was; the actual human-type individuals just stood around behind the singer and kind of patted her sadly on the shoulder now and then, like if all them Charlie’s Angels types had gone to a funeral wearing the uniforms of a dead dictator (red sash and all), and had to console the bereaved but full-voiced singer.

Also, you can’t dismiss the Georgians, who were kind of a Bjork song without Bjork, but with riverdancing samurais. That’s worth something.

Particularly compelling, the Brits singing a commercial for some airline that doesn’t exist, ’cause even Easyjet has better marketing materials than that, their attendants are kinda funny and these guys, what? Flying the flag all over the world.

Null points. Zero. Oh, drat, no, they have a few. If there was any justice, UK would have points taken away for that performance. Like, Blair would have to resign or something.

And, what? Estonia’s voting for Russia? Has anybody been reading the news? Or wait, the same Kremlin guys that hacked Estonia’s web sites totally jacked the Estonian vote. There’s gonna be riots again.

UPDATE: And there’s the Serbians winning. What’s a chubby transvestite gotta do to get a little respect around here? Not bad quality-wise, but let’s just say there’s not gonna be any Arockalypse this year.

Back with Marti DiBergi, it’s Spinal Tap, in a new short, back together for the 26th time in 25 years. Nigel is picked up off a horse farm, where he’s working with the miniature ponies, hoping one day to race them with miniature jockeys. David St. Hubbins is a hip-hop record producer, and Derek Smalls is in rehab for Internet addiction. New song, new interviews, explanation of Nigel’s work with ferrets. W00t!

The Berlinale is ongoing, one of the largest film festivals in the world, 500 flicks to be seen in a few weeks time, stars in town seeing the glamorous sights like the mall at Potzdamer Platz, and a whole host of genuinely great movies. We saw our first tonight, the Chinese “Getting Home,” or literally translated “Fallen Leaves Return to Roots” — a sweetly bitter comedy about a laborer who, thanks to a drunken promise, is bringing his friend’s dead body across the country to return it to his home. Much difficulty ensues. Dead men rise and walk, sometimes just roll down mountains in giant wheels. The director, who was there, described it as a “Chinese road movie.”

It’s strange that virtually all the festival movies are translated into English. The announcers speak in English. Barely any actual German around. No wonder the French hate Hollywood.

I rarely write about TV, because a) I don’t watch much and b) I can barely make ours work. But for the last few days we’ve been re-obsessing with the unparalleled Battlestar Galactica, getting into the third season via iTunes. It’s incredible, a sci-fi show that’s dark, with deep characters, and has managed to make one of the most intense anti-war, or at least provocative pro-thinking statements I’ve seen from popular art about Iraq to date.

For those who haven’t followed: Humans are on the run from the Cylons. There aren’t many humans left. They settle on a planet, but the Cylons catch up with them, and decide that they’re going to make amends for the whole genocide episode by occupying the colony and bringing stability, the hope of peaceful co-existence, and their superior religion. The humans here take the role of Iraqis; there’s an Abu Ghraib, there are prisoners with bags over their heads, there are despised police working with the occupiers, there are occupiers trying to figure out why they’re not being welcomed, and how to win over the locals’ hearts and minds by improving the quality of toilet paper. There is an insurgency. Even suicide bombings.

It’s utterly intense, heartbreaking, great drama. It doesn’t totally make sense (what war scenario really does, come on). But as a way to provoke role-reversal analysis, it’s beautiful, unsubtle, and necessary today.

From a Pittsburgh article a bit ago:

Instead of trying to out-do “Star Trek,” producers went back to the origins of science-fiction, taking their cues from the novels of Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. “Those were all about the allegorical and socio-political commentary, which we felt had been lost in contemporary science fiction. It wasn’t so much about us coming up with a new idea as going back to an old one, using science-fiction as a smokescreen to discuss and invest in issues of the day.” (sez executive producer David Eick)

More power to them. This is popular art done *well,* with a tradition that goes all the way back to Aristophanes’ bitterly anti-war comedies.