we’ve wanted to be “cool” now for 50 years. “No other cultural phenomenon in the United States has lasted so long. None has determined so powerfully how we want to be thought of. And even the geekiest among us, the proudest and most combative of misfits, lepers with ulcerated noses forever pressed to the glass, have at one time or another allowed it to influence their decisions. It is that much an American standard.”
Month: March 2006
Finalists For This Year’s Criticism Pulitzer
This year’s Pulitzer Prize finalists for criticism? Tyler Green has the early word…
Amazon Taking The Online Hollywood Plunge?
Is Amazon getting ready to enter the online download business? Reports say the company has been in talks with major movie studios. “Amazon has been increasing its spending in research and development. Financial analysts have thus far reacted positively to the prospect of Amazon entering the digital download business, which boasts higher margins than the retailer’s traditional business. Amazon’s investment in technology and content grew 57 percent in the fourth quarter.”
Micro-Niche TV Programming Finding An Audience Online
“In the last six months, major media companies have received much attention for starting to move their own programming online, whether downloads for video iPods or streaming programs that can be watched over high-speed Internet connections. Perhaps more interesting — and, arguably, more important — are the thousands of producers whose programming would never make it into prime time but who have very dedicated small audiences. It’s a phenomenon that could be called slivercasting.”
The Best Of The Not-Quites
The late 1960s and early ’70s were a period of major transition for Hollywood, and a large number of films which might have been hailed as classics in today’s watered-down movie landscape instead fell through the cracks. This week in LA, American Cinematheque is mounting a festival of films from the “New Hollywood” era that, for one reason or another, never quite made it into the filmmaking canon.
When Paul Met Vincent…
“In 1888, Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin spent nine weeks living together in Arles. It was a time of astonishing creativity, culminating in a catastrophic falling-out.” A new book gets into the nitty-gritty of the relationship between the two masters and finds a collaboration that was far more than the sum of its parts.
Inspired By… What, Exactly?
Every artist, actor, writer, and musician talks about it, but what is this mysterious thing called ‘inspiration’? “If you are a religious believer of any denomination you know, or at least you have words for, where your inspiration comes from, however mysterious it may seem… But for the more secular-minded there is not much language to talk about inspiration without beginning to sound a bit mystical, reliant on some powerful source or force that can’t quite be named but can’t quite be ignored.”
Nudity? Cool! Oh, It’s A Dude? Hmm.
“Probably nothing so alienates us from the high art of the European past as its most prestigious subject – the male nude. Visit any old European museum, from Naples to Bloomsbury, and they have more marble statues of disrobed gods and heroes than they can reasonably display. Once these nudes were considered the apex of European culture. Today we don’t really know what to do with them.”
Seeing The Big Picture, And Showing It To The Rest Of Us
Gordon Parks, the photographer and filmmaker who died last week at 93, was a master at finding the inherent truth in any situation, and his photographs told stories far bigger than the events they captured. “In the end this could be the true source of Gordon Parks’ great appeal — his ability to find the universal significance in one person’s story, whether that of a boy in the barrios of Rio de Janeiro, or a gang leader from Harlem, and put that story in a form that the relentlessly mainstream middle class readers of Life could see and understand.”
Is Boston Ballet Back?
“With the world premiere Thursday of ‘Up and Down’ by Mark Morris, the Boston Ballet celebrates an important milestone in its relationship with the renowned choreographer — one that it could not have reached a few years ago, before artistic director Mikko Nissinen came to town.” Specifically, the company believes it has completed its comeback, and is again ready to rank with the top ballets in the country. The always-outspoken Morris appears to agree.