“A new book by Munira Mirza, the culture adviser to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has been withdrawn because of a legal problem over a Tate image on its cover.”
Month: February 2012
Britain’s Illiteracy Problem
“Poor neighbourhoods in England are still beset by Victorian-era levels of illiteracy, the schools minister has claimed.”
Top-Rated Part Of SuperBowl 2012? Madonna
“Overall, Madonna’s show was more popular viewing by nearly a 16 percent margin over the game itself – and TiVo said it wasn’t because so many viewers rewound to watch rapper M.I.A give them the finger, though the company is checking to see if the controversy encourages those who recorded the Super Bowl to go back to that moment and see it for themselves.”
M.I.A.’s Middle Finger Salute During Super Bowl Broadcast Unlikely To Rouse FCC
“Right now, the U.S. Supreme Court is in the midst of considering the FCC’s constitutional allowances to police indecency, and until that happens, the rulebook is in flux as the 2nd Circuit has already struck down some of the agency’s policies on naughty words on broadcast television.”
Brit Musicians Surge On UK Charts
“Brits made up 56 of the top 100 biggest-selling album artists, including acts as varied as Plan B, The Vaccines, Kasabian and actor Hugh Laurie with his blues album. US artists represented almost a third of sales, the lowest share since 1999, but accounting for the second biggest share of acts. Canada was third while Barbados was fourth, solely on the back of Rihanna’s success.”
Dickens Gets A Google Doodle For His Burthday
The search engine redecorates its logo for the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth.
Seattle’s Intiman Theatre Beats Its Fundraising Goal And Says It Will Continue
Intiman intends to now operate on a pay-as-you-go model, with a shorter season, a smaller staff and strict financial accounting. “Our budget used to be five or six million dollars a year,” noted Jones. “Clearly we could not sustain that and needed to dial it back.”
Eisenhower Family Doesn’t Like Frank Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial
“The design shows Eisenhower as a youth gazing out at images of his adult accomplishments against a backdrop of the Kansas plains. But the Eisenhower family objects to the design and is attempting to delay approval of the project in a dispute that has pitted a leading American family against one of the country’s most recognized architects.”
Not Dinner Theater, But Dining As Theater
“It’s not often that I take my seat at a restaurant out of breath and disoriented but the Secret Restaurant prides itself on the punter’s total immersion into the setting – on the night I visited, that was Vienna, 1946. Having whispered a password in a Frenchman’s ear and been led a scrambling chase through tunnels, over duckboards and up flight after flight of freezing stairs, the diner finally finds themselves [sic] in a candlelit loft.”
The Book Of Mormon Beats Wicked and The Lion King In Broadway Box Office Race
“After 11 months of performances on Broadway, The Book Of Mormon reached a milestone last week in its extraordinary box office success fueled by premium ticket pricing: The musical beat the long-running blockbusters Wicked and The Lion King to become the top-grossing show in a single week for the first time, even though Mormon had hundreds of fewer seats to sell to each performance than those two other commercial hits.”