“No one can deny that he’s successful: Bocelli has sold about 45 million recordings worldwide, and maintains a permanent address on Billboard magazine’s top-classical-artists chart. Like all big stars, he’s become an industry, slickly packaged and watched over by agents, recording executives and concert promoters. His image is carefully managed: Any journalist who would interview him is advised by his handlers not to ask about his blindness or his personal life. In other words, there will be no questions about the loss of his eyesight to glaucoma at the age of 12, or about his divorce in 2001 from his wife, Enrica.”
Month: April 2005
Video Finds The Book Biz
“With the advent of services like VidLit, which produces short, humorous, animated Flash films about books, authors have a new way to reach online readers. Because of the viral quality of online videos, some writers are finding success at the end of the broadband pipe…”
Christie’s Baroque
“The Pied Piper of the ongoing revival of Baroque operas, William Christie is not a man to be disobeyed. If we are now familiar with countless rarities by Handel, as well as long-forgotten gems by Monteverdi, Purcell and the French masters Lully, Charpentier and Rameau, it’s largely because of Mr. Christie’s passion for music written between, roughly, 1600 and 1750, and his ability to sniff out buried musical gold as unerringly as a pig finds truffles.”
Tapestries Solved In Billions Of Numbers
An attempt to clean and digitally photograph important tapestries from New York’s Cloisters becomes a puzzle only solved when sophisticated mathematicians crunch the billions of numbers stored in digital images. “Each pixel had to be calculated in its relationship to every other nearby pixel, a mathematical problem, known as an N-problem, big enough to practically choke [a supercomputer]. This was a math problem similar to the analysis of DNA or speech recognition…”
After The Theatre? Clevelanders Sleep In The Next Day
Clevelanders going out to theatre or concerts on weeknights may be eligible to come to work two hours late the next morning. “The “Late Out, Late In” promotion, announced Monday, is meant to encourage music and theater fans to enjoy the city’s nightlife, even on weeknights. The city’s tourism agency organized the promotion with participating employers.”
Gore’s TV For The Internet Generation
What will Al Gore’s new TV network look like when it launches this summer? “At first called INdTV, the network now named Current plans to air short- form, fast-paced segments and snippets called “pods” rather than shows. Tailored for the short attention span, they will be anywhere from 15 seconds to five minutes long.”
Pulitzer Win Boosts Poet Laureate
US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s win of a Pulitzer Monday will boost exposure and sales of his work. Kooser’s publisher Michael Wiegers said that, “in the wake of yesterday’s announcement, he received orders from book distributors for an additional 10,000 copies of “Delights,” which has already sold some 30,000 copies. “You’re looking at selling 40,000 copies of a poetry book in a world where you’d be happy if you sell 3,000.”
American TV Networks Find Religion (Will Ratings Follow?)
America’s TV networks think there’s money in religion. So get ready for a string of religious-themed programming. “A miniseries about the Book of Revelation airs next week, while shows about a Catholic priest probing the supernatural and an Episcopalian minister who converses with God are on the drawing board. Traditionally soft-focused spirituality, exemplified by “Touched by an Angel” and “Joan of Arcadia,” is giving way to programs rooted in specific religions and their elements.”
Scientists: Poetry Makes You Think Harder Than Prose
“Psychologists at Dundee and St Andrews universities claim the work of poets such as Lord Byron exercise the mind more than a novel by Jane Austen. By monitoring the way different forms of text are read, they found poetry generated far more eye movement which is associated with deeper thought. Subjects were found to read poems slowly, concentrating and re-reading individual lines more than they did with prose.”
Scottish Art In Danger Of Devolution
The director of the National Galleries of Scotland warns that a proposal to redistribute art across the country’s galleries will backfire. “What will happen in Scotland unless we are very careful is that local authorities will say to themselves that they need to have a museum which they do not have already, so all the smaller galleries and museums in Perth, Dundee and Auchterarder – places like that – will all have art centres. If you do have a geographical redistribution of works of art in Scotland, it will mean that the relatively small metropolitan collections will be redistributed, or the monies will be redistributed from them, which will make them ineffective.”