There’s a new wave of zombie movies. Zombie movies date back to the 1930s, and though they sometimes go away for a decade, they always seem to return. And what makes zombies such attractive horror fare? “They can be anything you want them to be. They can carry any metaphor you like. They can stand for man’s environmental meddling, or of our alienation from each other. They are there to be controlled.”
Month: April 2004
Bergman: My Movies Depress Me
Legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman admits he can’t watch his own movies because they’re too depressing. “I don’t watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry… and miserable. I think it’s awful,”
NPR – Youth Kick Responsible For Edwards Ouster?
National Public Radio’s ouster of Bob Edwards as host of Morning Edition is still being discussed: “In public radio, no less than on the commercial dial, the search for younger listeners keeps executives at their desks deep into the night. And with overall radio listening in dramatic decline in recent years, programmers are constantly searching for something new. That led some station executives to conclude that Edwards’s ouster was all about catering to young listeners.”
Defending Canadian Movies…
Last week when word a deal the Canadian Telefilm was making with Hollywood leaked out, there was an outcry. “You may get the impression from this uproar that the Canadian content of our home-made movies, so cherished by our audiences that they account for something less than 1 per cent of the box-office take in English Canada, is about to be deeply compromised.” But it’s not. INdeed it might be a way to improve the Canadian film industry.
Denver: Changing Horses In Mid-Construct
Denver’s major cultural institutions are in the midst of a building boom. But several of those institutions are in a hunt for new top leadership. And that means…
Making The Sausage
Theater people love to talk about “process,” whether it be the actor’s process of developing a character or the director’s process of fashioning a cast, crew, and set into a believable story. But the behind-the-scenes process that goes into creating a single theater season may be the most fascinating process of them all, and for the people who run Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, it’s a study in compromise and a careful balance between challenging the audience and satisfying the ever-present demand for the familiar.
Split Signal
Ever since classical music station WFLN switched to a rock format in the mid-1990s, fans of classical music and jazz in the city of Philadelphia have had to share a single radio station, Temple University-owned WRTI, which attempts to please everyone with 12 hours of classical and 12 hours of jazz each day. It’s better than nothing, of course, but there’s been plenty of grumbling about the lack of seperate jazz and classical stations in the nation’s 4th-largest radio market. But now, WRTI is planning to begin splitting its signal into two different full-time streams – one jazz, one classical – offering listeners with high-definition receivers a choice of what they hear at any given time.
Hockey: Built For Life In Canada
Everyone knows that hockey is a national obsession in Canada, but even some Canadians are surprised by the way the game has suddenly exploded across the nation’s cultural scene. Just as baseball has inspired generations of American authors, singers, playwrights, and photographers, so hockey is now finding its way onto Canadian stages, screens, and bookstore shelves. If baseball is as pastoral and cerebral as Americans would like to believe themselves to be, hockey is distinctly Canadian: simultaneously graceful and gritty, with a quiet undercurrent of ugliness that almost requires a poet’s soul to understand. And just as hockey is facing a crisis that threatens to destroy the sport, many Canadians fear that their unique culture may be slipping away as well…
The Dream and Nightmare Of The Asian Megacity
“The United Nations says that by 2010, some 18 of the world’s 30 largest cities will be in Asia (compared to only three from Europe and North America). In the region’s new megacities, height is might, speed is wealth, density is power, and the skyscraper — that American symbol of modernity — grows on steroids and is colonizing the sky.” Trying to define these supermetropolises as good or bad, dangerous or progressive, is useless, and misses the point in any case. Any organism as huge and complex as a city cannot be reduced to such platitudes, and the startlingly fast growth going on in Asian cities provides plenty for urbanists of all stripes to marvel and shudder at.
The New Graham Devotees
Martha Graham’s dances are hardly what one would call timeless: in fact, many look distinctly old-fashioned in the modern era. So what is it about the mystique of Martha that has made her legacy such a draw for young dancers seeking to make their mark in the dance world? A new generation of Graham proteges gives varying answers to the question, but all speak of a certain “emotional trutfulness” that distinguishes a Graham dance.