Before video really takes off on the internet there will have to be a way to find the video you want. “In recent weeks, Yahoo, Google and MSN have each rolled out services designed to make it easier to upload or locate video online. The portals’ rollouts come as a handful of startups and independent film sites are creating tools to make putting video online nearly as simple as publishing text.”
Month: April 2005
Chicago’s Dueling Art Fairs
“Chicago will be the site of not one but two big international contemporary art fairs starting their simultaneous four-day public runs on Friday. But out of sight at both will be three of this city’s more prominent, high-end contemporary art dealers.”
Fun Rules In New Broadway Hits
“The juggernaut shows are no longer based on teary epics or lugubrious legends or dark poems. The singing gloom-and-doom characters of the Great White Way — the bedraggled street urchins and guilt-ridden Vietnam War veterans and weather-beaten felines — have packed up their dressing rooms. One formidable survivor, that spectral opera-house haunter in the half-mask, is looking ever lonelier. Today, the hits are all about tee-hee and ha-ha and oh-ho-ho. What packs ’em in is hilarity in major chords. Monty Python, Mel Brooks, sex-crazed puppets, Harvey Fierstein in a triple-D cup: These are the new aristocrats of Broadway. Types with a thing for the funny bone.”
Self-Publishing Finds Its Legs
“For the first time, print-on-demand companies are successfully positioning themselves as respectable alternatives to mainstream publishing and erasing the stigma of the old-fashioned vanity press. Some even make a case that they give authors an advantage — from total control over the design, editing and publicity to a bigger share of the profits.”
English Exams That Skip The 19th Century
Is the English school curriculum being dumbed down? “More than 400,000 students took the AQA GCSE in English literature last year. The exam offers questions on one of eight novels, including Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, and The Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger – both 20th century classics. But no 19th century novels make it on to the list, and teenagers can also get an AQA A-level without studying a single pre-20th century novelist. ‘This is a real sign of dumbing down. Many of the books which are put in front of children nowadays simply do not merit the amount of time which is spent on them’.”
Is The Quintessential Chicago Writer No More?
“Chicago was very much a writer’s town in 1951, even if no one obvious giant walked the Loop, and remains a writer’s town to this day, though the one indisputable giant of the last five decades, Saul Bellow, died earlier this month. Dozens of writers in Chicago — or from Chicago — continue to produce critically acclaimed novels and stories, occasionally inspired but seldom intimidated by the Ghosts of Chicago Writers Past. What may be on its last legs, however, is the idea of the quintessential Chicago writer, neck-deep in despairing urban realism, following in the bottom-dog literary tradition of Dreiser, James T. Farrell, Richard Wright and Algren. You just don’t hear that voice much anymore.”
Power To The People – Opera In An Ice Rink
“Graham Vick, the respected opera director, is attempting his own radical solution to declining audiences and the trappings of elitism by staging a Monteverdi opera with a mix of professionals and amateurs in a burnt-out ice rink in Birmingham’s Chinatown.”
Cast Album As Promotional Giveaway
Broadway cast albums rarely make much money. But they are very valuable as promotional tools for a show trying to hit it big. So the producers of Broadway’s “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” is giving away 50,000 copies of the show’s album as a way of promoting it.
Remmereit – A Star-In-Waiting?
James Oestreich reports that 43-year-old Norwegian conductor Arild Remmereit has come out of nowhere to be a star-in-waiting. He’s recently substituted at La Scala and at the Pittsburgh Symphony, and seems destined to be a major conductor.
Are Opera DVD’s Too Much Of A Good Thing?
Anthony Tomnasini views the flood of new opera DVD’s with alarm. “With the DVD boom, will the labels start issuing operas based primarily on the production’s visual elements? The market is already flooded with routine musical performances of well-known works that just happened to have been taped for DVD. Also, as dramatic as opera may be, it’s refreshing to hear just the music on a fine recording without the powerful distraction, in a sense, of a production. There are recordings that I never tire of because the visceral impact of the music-making allows my dramatic imagination such fancy. But I do tire of seeing the same sets and costumes, the same camera angles, the same close-ups.”