“The era of the commercial classical record label is past. These days, if you are an orchestra and want to record, you do it yourself.”
Month: June 2008
Broadway Falls Just Short Of Record Year (Blame The Strike)
“Legiters can blame the shortfall on the stagehands strike, which darkened more than 25 productions over a 19-day stretch in November that included the ultra-profitable Thanksgiving frame. The strike and its repercussions provide the grains of salt to be taken with many of the observations gleaned from the 2007-08 season — from how much money was made to how many straight plays Broadway can sustain.”
Why Sex and the City Has Got Critics Bedeviled
“Why do so many critics and commentators have Sex on the brain? Are they unable to accept a movie about four successful women?”
A Plea To Preserve Movie History
The fire at Universal Studios las week “I hope, will prompt Universal and its fellow majors to better preserve not just key titles but also the other 90 percent of their inventories, the less famous and therefore more vulnerable titles that the studio may not feel justify spending thousands to save. These are exquisite samples of 20th-century American culture and deserve to always be seen in their extravagant, sensual, big-screen glory.”
New Zaha Hadid Dubai Arts Project Seems To Emerge From The Sand
“This landmark development will accommodate an opera house, playhouse, arts gallery, performing arts school and themed hotel on an island in Dubai Creek just off the mainland part of the district. All of these facilities will be state of the art to host world class performances and exhibitions.”
Art Basel Stays Steady Despite Drop In Americans
Collectors from Russia, Asia and the Middle East are taking up the slack of fewer Americans at Switzerland’s Art Basel.
Orange County Museum Is Moving
“The Newport Beach-based museum is announcing today that it is relocating to Costa Mesa, and has received legal title to a 1.64-acre parcel of land next to the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. The land transfer is the first major step toward moving the county’s contemporary art museum, now tucked away in Newport Center, to the central arts district across from South Coast Plaza that’s being billed as the Segerstrom Center for the Arts.”
Two Climbers Use Architecture As A Jungle Gym
by climbing the New York Times building Friday. “The pair of incidents also introduced a new word to the pop-culture lexicon: “buildering,” which means to scale a piece of architecture without any equipment. (It’s adapted from the rock-climbing term “bouldering.”) There is, not surprisingly, a whole series of websites devoted to the obscure hobby, including buildering.net, on which by Thursday night the message boards were buzzing with news of Robert’s latest conquest.”
Misunderstanding The “Butterfly Effect”
“Translated into mass culture, the butterfly effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy.” But “the larger meaning of the butterfly effect is not that we can readily track such connections, but that we can’t.”
Dance Writ (Very) Large
“David Michalek that projects images of dancers on three 12-metre-tall screens in hyper-slow motion. For these towering figures, each five-second dance movement plays out over 10 minutes in minute detail. That yield is a study of the dancer, both in physical form and emotional expression, writ large in a public arena, with audience interaction en masse considered crucial to the experience.”