Columns

‘Love Parade’
to be toned down 

BERLIN — This year’s Love Parade, the techno street festival that’s expected to draw hundreds of thousands of ravers to downtown Berlin this weekend, promises to be cleaner and more orderly than in years past. 

In response to complaints from environmentalists that partygoers relieving themselves and throwing garbage into the city’s main Tiergarten park was destroying trees and flowers, organizers have pledged to be more vigilant in monitoring the event. 

Some 2,000 police officers and 1,000 medical workers will be there, and parade organizers have hired a company to clean up after Saturday’s daylong event. 

“We’re also deploying ushers this year who are meant to keep overly wild ravers in check,” said Ralf Regitz, manager of Planetcom, one of two companies organizing the event. 

This year’s floats, loaded with speakers blasting techno music, will snake through the Tiergarten under the motto, “Access Peace.” Internationally famous disc jockeys are scheduled to appear at the event and at parties in nightclubs Saturday evening. 

The Love Parade has been waning in popularity since 1999, when it drew a record 1.5 million people. Last year, only 800,000 attended, down from 1.3 million the year before. 

This year, the parade has the cloud of a terrorist threat hanging over its head as well, although Berlin police have said a report they received of a plot to set off a bomb during the festival was unsubstantiated. 

Art gallery to
pull all-nighter  

LONDON — Britain’s Tate Modern art gallery is extending its opening hours, including one all-night session, to cope with demand to view its Matisse Picasso exhibition. 

The show has been one of the gallery’s most successful — more than 250,000 people have visited already — and 150,000 more are expected before it closes at the end of August. 

In response, the Tate Modern will open beyond normal hours until 10 p.m. every day from July 19 until the last weekend of Aug. 17-18 when it will stay open for 36 hours. It usually closes at 6 p.m. on weekdays and 10 p.m. on weekends. 

The gallery said in a statement Thursday that an “extraordinary number” of people had visited the exhibition, which examines a complicated, decades-long friendship between the two artists. 

Matisse Picasso opened May 11. It moves to the Grand Palais in Paris from Sept. 25-Jan. 6, then to New York’s Museum of Modern Art from Feb. 13-May 19, 2003. 

‘The Jerry Springer Show’
named worst
show of all time  

NEW YORK — The worst TV shows ever are pretty bad — but “The Jerry Springer Show” tops TV Guide’s list. 

“Awful television shows are a storied part of our society,” TV Guide editor-in-chief Steven Reddicliffe said Friday. “Some of them actually are very successful and are great guilty pleasures. And no one has turned guilty-pleasure TV into more of an art form than Jerry Springer.” 

The list is in the July 20 issue of the magazine, on newsstands Monday. 

“The Jerry Springer Show,” a syndicated daytime talk-show hit since 1991, was first on a list of 50 worst shows only two months after “Seinfeld” was No. 1 on a TV Guide list of the best 50 shows. 

Second worst on the new list was NBC’s “My Mother The Car,” 1965-66, followed by NBC, UPN and TNN’s “XFL,” 2001; ABC’s “The Brady Bunch Hour” (1977); and CBS’ “Hogan’s Heroes” (1965-71). 

Rounding out the top 10 were “Celebrity Boxing” (Fox, 2002-present); “AfterMASH” (CBS, 1983-84); “Cop Rock” (ABC, 1990); “You’re in the Picture” (CBS, 1961); and “Hee Haw Honeys” (syndicated, 1978-79). 

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Musee Mecanique, a collection of 150 antique coin-operated games, has found a new home on Fisherman’s Wharf. 

Port officials agreed Tuesday to negotiate a lease to house the Musee with the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society on Pier 45 for at least the next 2 1/2 years. 

Musee owner Ed Zelinsky said he was happy with the decision. The Musee’s future has been uncertain since Zelinsky learned earlier this year that he would have to move the collection from the Cliff House when renovations on the building begin this September. 

“It’s good to have a home,” he said. 

The proposed lease is set to begin Sept. 1, but the Musee probably will not open until October, said Musee spokesman Jim Lazarus. 

The combined exhibits are expected to draw 150,000 visitors to the pier annually, port officials said. 

Zelinsky will continue negotiations with the Park Service for a permanent home within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which is the Musee’s present home. 

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On the Net: 

Musee Mecanique Web site: http://museemecanique.citysearch.com/1.html 

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HOUSTON (AP) — Todd Frazier got the idea for an opera about a heart transplant when he heard Aaron Copland’s Symphony No. 3 while watching his father in the operating room. 

“That was going through, this beautiful music, and this person was receiving a new life with a new heart,” he said. The idea for his opera was born. 

“It just struck me as such a modern subject,” Frazier told the Houston Chronicle this week. “The art of a culture kind of defines what’s important in a culture.” 

Frazier said the heart transplant “was the only procedure that I had kind of a dramatic response to” while watching his father, Dr. O.H. “Bud” Frazier, chief of transplant services at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston. 

He found it amazing, he said, that the seemingly dead organ would begin functioning again when ties are released, allowing blood to rush in. 

“My dad always said when the warm blood hits the new heart, the heart just remembers how to beat,” he said. “And it does. Right when the blood hits it, it erupts and it starts beating.” 

Frazier said his opera is “a way to recognize through art the advancements of science that are happening in particular in Houston, but also to shed light on all these modern challenges that are created.” 

In his opera, the donor is a young artist, the daughter of a blind woman who acted as her mother’s eyes until her untimely death.