Author: Tambiyan Samvel

Renowned classical sound director and producer Igor Fiorini is planning a major project, in conjunction with acclaimed Italian live sound engineer Luca Giannerini, which will take place at the end of September 2015, according to

This will involve the live performance, recording and broadcast in high definition DXD/DSD of a concert to mark the centenary of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Entitled The Amen Project, the concert will take place at the main Arena in Verona and will use music, words and dance to trace the history of the Armenian people to the current day.

“We will have plenty of musicians to capture, plus a number of choirs including a children’s choir,” Fiorini says. “This is a massive cultural event that will be broadcast live on television so it is imperative that we get it right.”

Princess Charlotte, the baby daughter of Britain’s Prince William and his wife Kate, will be christened by the Archbishop of Canterbury next month, her father’s office announced on Friday, REuters reports.

The ceremony for Charlotte, who was born last month, will take place on July 5 at St Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham where William and Kate, known officially as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, have a country home on Queen Elizabeth’s estate in eastern England.

It will be conducted by Archbishop Justin Welby, the spiritual head of the Anglican Church, who also oversaw the christening of her elder brother Prince George, who will celebrate his second birthday next month.

The newest member of the British royal family, whose full name is Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, in a nod to her late grandmother Princess Diana and her great-grandmother Queen Elizabeth, has not been seen in public since she left hospital with her parents on May 2.

Some of Canada’s most renowned artists received lifetime achievement awards this year’s Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards Gala, the country’s most prestigious award given for artistic accomplishments.

Oscar-nominated Armenian Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, known for works such as “The Sweet Hereafter” and “The Captive,” was among the laureates at the award ceremony held Saturday at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

Other award winners included songwriter Sarah McLachlan, actress and director Diana Leblanc, composer and conductor Walter Boudreau, and actor R. H. Thomson.

Peter Balakian’s new books Ozone Journal (poems) and Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture have just been published by the University of Chicago Press, the Armenian Weekly reports.

The long poem in Balakian’s new book is a sequel to his acclaimed “A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy” (2010). While excavating the remains of Armenian Genocide survivors in the Syrian desert with a TV crew, the persona navigates his own memory of New York City in a decade (the 1980’s) of crisis—as AIDS and climate change make a context for his personal struggles and his pursuit of meaning in the face of loss and catastrophe. Whether his poems explore Native American villages of New Mexico, the slums of Nairobi, or the Armenian-Turkish borderland, Balakian’s poems continue to engage the harshness and beauty of contemporary life in a language that is layered, sensual, elliptical, and defined by wired phrases and shifting tempos. Ozone Journal creates inventive lyrical insight in a global age of danger and uncertainty.

“In his new book, Ozone Journal, Balakian masterfully does the thing nobody else does, which is to derange history into poetry, to make poetry painting, to make painting culture, to make culture living, and with a historical depth that finds the right experience in language,” writes the poet Bruce Smith.

In Vise and Shadow, Balakian brings together his most influential essays of the past 25 years. He argues that the force of the lyric imagination is able to hold experience under pressure like a vise, while it also shadows history. Precise, lyrical, and eloquent, Balakian’s essays explore the ways poetry engages disaster and ingests mass-violence without succumbing to the didactic.

He gives us new insights into the relationships between trauma, memory, and aesthetic form. His essays on major Armenian voices (Charents, Gorky, and Siamanto) and the aftermath of genocide are a fresh contribution to contemporary literature and art. Other essays engage painting, collage, song-lyrics, and film as forms of enduring lyric knowledge, and include T.S. Eliot, Joan Didion, Robert Rauschenberg, Adrienne Rich, Hart Crane, Theodore Roethke, Elia Kazan and Bob Dylan.

About Vise and Shadow, James Carroll writes, “With soaring critical erudition, Peter Balakian’s essays range across multiple genres—poetry, memoir, film, visual art, history, ‘literary rock’—to create a brilliant ‘collage’ of both American imagination and Armenian memory. An elegantly written seminal work of sweeping importance.” Askold Melncyczuk writes, “Vise and Shadow belongs on a shelf alongside the literary essays of J. M. Coetzee, Adrienne Rich, and Seamus Heaney.”

Peter Balakian is the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University. He is the author of seven books of poems and four prose works, including The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, a New York Times best seller, and Black Dog of Fate, a memoir, winner of the PEN/Albrand Prize.

The Turkish Supreme Court has ruled that the construction of an 1,100-room palace by President Erdogan was illegal. The palace was constructed on protected land, reports.

Tuesday’s decision by Turkey’s Supreme Court revoked the building permit that had been issued to build President President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s palace after the fact because it had been illegally built on protected land.

The palace was inaugurated in October to coincide with Erdogan’s transition from head of government as Prime Minister to head of state as President. The building has had plenty of critics, many of whom focus on the construction costs of just over 500 million euros (well over $600 million) for the 1,100-room palace.

The presidential palace, popularly dubbed Ak Saray (“White Palace”) was built under controversial circumstances, in a wooded area within the Ataturk Forest Farm in Ankara. The construction went ahead despite environmental concerns and court orders, prompting its critics to instead call it Kacak Saray (“Illegal Palace”).

It appears now that they may be right with the moniker, however it remains unclear if the court decision will have any consequences for Erdogan or the completed palace.

Parliamentary elections in Turkey are approaching on June 7. As president, Erdogan is not allowed to partipate in any campaigning, but his recent speeches have carried a distinct undertone of support for the AKP, the party he previously led as prime minister. There is also increased support in Turkey for Erdogan’s plan of assigning more powers to his new role as president, currently seen as a largely ceremonial role.

A prayer service commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide was held at the Washington National Cathedral on May 7.

The service remembers those lost in the genocide and shows gratitude for the regeneration of life that the survivors worked so hard to create.

United States Vice President Joseph Biden and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, joined President of Armenia Serzh Sarkisian, Catholicos Karekin II, and Catholicos Aram I, in a prayer service.

The Faster Times
May 22 2010

Armenian Bloggers Seize Influence With the Power of ¦ Live Journal?

May 22, 2010
by Nicholas Clayton

When the Live Journal `virtual community’ first came online in 1999,
it basically operated as a venue for whiny American middle-schoolers
to overshare, write bad poetry and meet pedophiles. At least that’s
how I saw it. I was in middle school at the time.

Ten years later, after Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and
iPhones apps seemed to have successively killed off the first
generation of blog platforms and social networks, I was stunned to
find that not only was Live Journal not extinct, but was in fact an
influential vehicle for grass roots activism, social discussion and
independent news sharing in Armenia ‘ a country lacking in all three.

Armenia is rated `partly free’ on democracy and `not free’ on the
status of its freedom of the press by Washington-based pro-democracy
NGO Freedom House. According to internetworldstats.com little over six
percent of Armenia’s population uses the internet, while most turn to
exclusively pro-government broadcast media for information. But for
Armenians, seeing isn’t believing.

According to the OSCE, 10 people were killed March 2008 when the
government violently dispersed protesters who disputed presidential
elections widely considered to be fraudulent. The mainstream media
coverage of this event, however, proved to be to a total
pro-government wash, causing confidence in media institutions to
plummet and blogging boomed.

Today, Armenia’s most popular bloggers get tens of thousands of page
views a day while the average circulation of Yerevan’s many newspapers
is around 3,000 each. The community of approximately 500 live journals
and stand-alone blogs has become an active force in Armenian society,
meeting in person and in cyberspace to organize petition campaigns and
flash mobs to protest local policies and use their growing influence
to spread information.

The government has taken notice.

Artur Papyan, creator of the Armenian Observer Blog, said government
officials have hired staffs of consultants to deal with the phenomenon
and many high-ranking officials have created blogs of their own. And,
earlier this month, when unveiling a controversial new proposal to
create a small number of foreign language schools in Armenia, Armenian
Education Minister Armen Ashotyan held a nearly 3-hour-long meeting
with various bloggers to present the government’s plan.

This makes Armenia a unique case as blogging in the other two
countries of the Caucasus region, Georgia and Azerbaijan, largely
reflects each of the countries’ respective political environments. In
pro-Western Georgia, where freedom of expression is arguably the most
respected, the number of blogs is higher, but the blogging community
has a much smaller impact on the political dialogue, and in
dictatorial Azerbaijan nearly all blogs are apolitical ‘ with two
political bloggers already having been sent to prison for
`hooliganism.’

In Armenia, meanwhile, the contrast between the country’s largely
closed political and media society and the level to which new media
has been able to drive the discourse is striking.

Not all Armenians are optimistic about the future of its small,
influential blogging community, however. Anna Simonyan, one of the
founders of the online magazine Yerevan.ru, which heavily incorporates
blogging into its interactive format, believes that Facebook,
currently the fastest growing social network in Armenia, will
gradually usurp the discussion. Independent bloggers will either be
disempowered, or will take salaried positions in media organizations
and will be gradually brought into the fold, as very few have made any
real advertising money from their blogging exploits.

But information security analyst and blogger Samvel Martirosyan
disagrees. He said that Yerevan’s blogging community is already seeing
a collaboration between individuals using both Live Journal and
Facebook.

`It is a real cooperation; Facebook is good for activism, but blogs
are better for brainstorming, creating ideas,’ he said. `Platform is
nothing, the idea is everything.’

In the end, although Armenia’s levels of internet penetration affects
the impact of new media activism within its borders, it hasn’t been an
obstacle for the overall consumption of blogs as much of the existing
Armenian blogosphere is geared more towards the larger, more
internet-savvy Armenian diaspora, which greatly outnumbers the
population of the small Caucasus nation of 3.5 million.

With issues like the normalization of ties with Turkey, resolving the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan and balancing the influence
of America, Russia and Iran on the country’s politics and economy ‘
issues on which residents and diaspora are often fiercely divided ‘
there’s bound to be plenty to talk about and plenty of places to do it
for years to come.

To keep seeing more updates on Armenia and more, check out TFT’s
membership plans!

Become a Member of The Faster Times today for as little $12 and you’ll
receive lots of great gifts ‘ plus the good feeling that comes with
supporting a team of independent journalists who are trying to create
a new model for the newspaper. (Sign up right away to make sure you
receive an invite to our first members-only event).

/22/armenian-bloggers-seize-influence-with-the-pow er-of-live-journal/

RA GOVERNMENT TO SIGN AGREEMENT ON CREDITING CONSTRUCTION OF ZVARTNOTS AIRPORT’S NEW PASSENGER TERMINAL

PanARMENIAN.Net
May 20, 2010 – 19:54 AMT 14:54 GMT

The Armenian government authorized the General Department of Civil
Aviation to sign a loan agreement on crediting the second stage of
the new passenger terminal’s construction. The loan agreement will
be signed by the RA government, Armenia International Airports CJSC
(Zvartnots), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Asian
Development Bank and German Investments and Development Company.

ARMENIAN DELEGATION TO "TRANSPORT AND INNOVATION: DISCOVERING ABILITIES" FORUM

Panorama.am
11:40 21/05/2010

Economy

German city of Leipzig will host on May 26-28 transport international
forum on "Transport and innovation: discovering abilities" which will
be attended by Armenian Minister of Transport Manuk Vardanyan and
the delegation chaired by him, press speaker of Transport Ministry
Susanna Tonoyan told Panorama.am.

International forum of transport is a part of the organization
on economic cooperation and development. The forum is a chance to
find solutions to many questions and to hold panel discussions over
transport innovations.

In the frames of the forum on May 27 transport ministers of different
countries are supposed to have a meeting.

INITIATORS OF OPENING FOREIGN-LANGUAGE SCHOOLS LACK STATE-ORIENTED MODE OF THINKING: VAZGEN MANUKYAN

Tert.am
16:26 21.05.10

It would be the greatest disillusion to consider the language as
simply a school subject or just a means of communication between
human beings. The language and the mode of thinking typical to a
particular language have spiritual and genetic roots, President of
the Public Council Vazgen Manukyan writes in a statement referring
to a pending bill proposed by the Ministry of Education and Science
that envisage reopening foreign-language schools in Armenia.

"Unable to develop a proper policy in educational system those
responsible want to hand in the sector, that is of significant
importance for our future, to foreigners. This testifies to the fact
that those responsible lack a state-oriented mode of thinking" reads
the statement.

Further it says that foreign-language schools will bring with them
a foreign educational system, foreign mode of thinking, foreign
psychology and a foreign world outlook.