Tom Hooper’s big-screen adaptation has clawed its way to $38 million globally after two weeks in theaters, a dismal figure that could result in $100 million in theatrical losses, according to rival studio executives. – Variety
Author: Douglas McLennan
Sarasota To Sarasota Symphony: Don’t Leave
City officials are especially sensitive to the possibility of losing the Sarasota Orchestra after the recent relocation of two other cultural institutions outside of the city. – Sarasota Herald Tribune
Even With Mega-Franchise Movies In 2019, Box Office Declined. Now What?
“The slide in revenues is still disappointing because it occurred at a time when Walt Disney Studios put nearly all of its major franchises on the field — a show of firepower that enabled the company to pulverize records, racking up more than $11 billion at the global box office. With an arsenal that includes Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar, and — thanks to its $71 billion acquisition of much of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — 20th Century Fox, Disney was able to control roughly 40% of the domestic marketplace.” – Variety
Always-On Culture Has Warped Our Sense of Time And Progress
“The reason that it feels like nothing happened in the 2010s is that too much happened. Each cultural landmark got instantly effaced by the onrush of the next, and the next. This memory-erosion effect is one reason why it feels like something’s gone awry with our sense of time. While the clock and the calendar continue to plod forward in their steadfast and remorseless way, what you could call “culture-time” feels like it’s become unmoored and meandering.” – The Guardian
Why Do Other Art Forms – Books, Movies, TV – Make Fun Of Theatre?
As if theater weren’t already mocked enough for its hysteria and jazz hands, it now seems to be pop culture’s punching bag. – The New York Times
Jimmy Iovine: The Music Business’s Looming Problem
“Margin. It doesn’t scale. At Netflix, the more subscribers you have, the less your costs are. In streaming music, the costs follow you. And the streaming music services are utilities — they’re all the same. Look at what’s working in video. Disney has nothing but original stuff. Netflix has tons of original stuff. But the music streaming services are all the same, and that’s a problem.” – The New York Times
How The On-Demand Economy Is Changing Our Experience of Cities
“The 2010s were the decade the city became an App Store: an online marketplace where our choices were closely tracked, where that data became part of the products we were using, and where digital clusters of activity displaced real-world transactions. Yes, we still go downtown for drinks, meals, and shopping experiences. But, more and more, we live in cities of the cloud.” – CityLab
What A Crossword Created By A Computational Linguistics Researcher Looks Like
“There’s a similar mixture that goes into being a computational linguistics researcher,” with lots of coding, math and empirical work. It certainly helps to have a love of language and be interested in the quirks of language.” – Washington Post
UNESCO And The Fight Over “World” Literature
UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary shows how, when confronted with people across the globe who perceived their own lives “in ways radically antagonistic to the requirements of capitalist production,” UNESCO’s cultural programming was developed to “acknowledge, integrate, manage, and assuage” that antagonism. – Los Angeles Review of Books
What Defined 2019? Ideas? People? How About Stuff?
“Look at the stuff. The Things. Objects. The products that overflow our commercial marketplace, designed for our consumption, that we loved, loathed, mocked, coveted, worried about, or just found so baffling we couldn’t stop obsessing about them.” – Medium