“This is an astonishing feat for a decade and a half old franchise that launched as a marginalized car culture movie with no stars and no imaginings of a long-term franchise future.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Kara Walker – A Whole New Approach To Public Art?
“Now 47, and a new kind of public figure thanks to the Sugar Baby, Walker remains suspicious of herself, and of the world, however much it has come to celebrate her, expressing to me the bewilderment of a thinker for whom no level of success can stamp out a phobia of personal self-satisfaction — or, worse, infidelity to craft.”
Tony Awards Are Having Big Trouble Finding A Host For This Year’s Show
“The Tonys have gone hostless before — with dire results. Theater people still wince at the memory of the 1999 awards, when a bunch of actors stood in a circle and declaimed famous lines from plays.”
The Rate Of Customers Ditching Cable Is Speeding Up
“U.S. pay-TV providers lost around 1.9 million subscribers last year, according to the latest research from Kagan, a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Meanwhile, “virtual” pay-TV services delivered over the internet like Dish’s Sling TV and AT&T’s DirecTV Now didn’t help stop the overall sector from shrinking in 2016.”
Music Sales Hit Five-year High In The UK
“Combined takings from streaming, downloads, physical sales and licensing for use in films, TV and computer games rose 5.1% to £926m. The main contributor to growth was streaming, but vinyl revenues rose by more than two thirds.”
Report: Impacts Of Streaming Live Performances Of The Arts
“The report, compiled by Frédéric Julien of CAPACOA and research consultant Inga Petri, argues that non-profit groups will need to consider their own versions of vertical integration, with presenters making strategic alliances with producers or co-operating with private industry to build networks large enough to draw the audiences they will need. As a model it points to Radioplayer Canada, a single app implemented by 400 public, private, community and campus radio stations. For the performing arts, the details are still hazy, but the message is clear: Go digital or go home.”
TS Eliot Had Very Specific Ideas About The Function And Role Of Criticism
What makes a critical judgment true is still a quandary. Eliot and F.R. Leavis exempted themselves from “interpretation,” which Eliot declared to be “only legitimate when it is not interpretation at all, but merely putting the reader in possession of facts which he would otherwise have missed.” This sentence marks a typical rhythm in Eliot’s critical mind: he tends to say that an exalted something is nothing but something mean to which it may decently be reduced.
“Miss Saigon” From A Vietnamese Perspective
“Much has been written about Miss Saigon, primarily by white writers: about the yellowface controversy, about the actors involved. But very few Vietnamese-Americans have weighed in. We are the sixth-largest immigrant group in America, numbering 1.3 million. And yet popular narratives of the Vietnam War typically exclude us. And as Miss Saigon tours the country next year, the most popular narrative of all will continue to shut us out.”
Like The Great Barrier Reef, London’s Orchestra Scene Is Dying – And Quickly
“The inertia of state funding, allied to the lack of imagination of arts centres, has sapped the fizz from London’s halls, like champagne bottles left uncorked for too long. Where once we were cocks of the concert walk, audiences in Munich and Milan cannot tell one London orchestra from the next. That’s how low we have sunk in five short years. So what’s to be done?”
Werner Herzog: Los Angeles Has The Most Substance Of Any City
Herzog says his humor has been buoyed over the past 20 years by his living in Los Angeles, which he turned to after things didn’t work out with San Francisco. “My wife and I found it not the most exciting place in the United States and we said we want to move to the city with the most substance, and it was immediately clear that Los Angeles, that’s the place.”