Retiring Colorado Shakespeare Company director Dick Devin “works in a world of ironies. The number of corporate sponsors has risen to 34 from just a handful a few years ago, but they give less and it costs more for the festival staff to bring in each one. Individual giving, however, is up. ‘We’ve increased the number of people who give almost threefold in the last few years. We value the 1,000 people more (who are giving) because that’s building for the future. Two years from now it’s really gonna pay off’.”
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Congressmen Demand Answers On Rating For Christian Movie
Members of the US Congress are demanding to know why a Christian-themed movie was rated PG. “House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and other lawmakers are demanding explanations after hearing complaints that the movie ‘Facing the Giants’ was rated PG instead of G due to religious content. The Motion Picture Association of America claims the controversy arose from a miscommunication with the filmmakers. It says religion was not the reason for the rating.”
High Gas Prices Squeeze Travelling Bands
“Big-name, established acts with fleets of buses feel the gouge of those gas prices, but the initial pain is softened by the equally big bucks they bring in. It’s the smaller bands living hand-to-mouth on the road that are feeling the money pinch the hardest. The price of gas has forced many to rethink how they travel. A new practicality — a rare condition for free-wheeling rock bands — is becoming the norm.”
Samuel Beckett And His Strange Cult Of Personality
“Beckett, who died in 1989, lived to see the full flowering of his fame, and the retiring Irishman was forced into a spotlight he had no desire to stand in. But what were the chances that this spotlight would shine on him in the first place? He was an obscure writer writing in a foreign language about obscure figures living in a very foreign world.”
Measuring The Money You Donate And (As Important) The Results
Throwing money at a problem is one way to help fix it. But how do you tell if a foundation is making an impact with its giving? It’s a bigger problem than you might tink…
The Trouble With iPods
“The iPod experience is a smooth ride, as sleek and impervious as the minicomputer itself-set it to shuffle and you’re sealed up in a dream machine, a twinkling drift through your own forgotten highlights. But for the Gen X-ers among us there’s a problem. The signal squeezed through an iPod’s white earbuds is not the warm and spacious headphone mindblow of old; to me it sounds bruisingly compressed, stripped of nuance, all bunched up in the midrange. Increasing the volume only distorts the bass and produces a nasty precipitation of treble, as if the drummer is flogging his cymbals with bicycle chains.”
Guernica Wants “Guernica” Back
“With the approach of the 70th anniversary of Guernica’s destruction by German bombers serving the nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War”, the townspeople of Guernica are seeking the iconic Picvasso work’s relocation from Madrid’s Reina Sofia modern art museum.
US Gallery Cancels Iraqi Gold Show
The famed Nimrud Gold was to have been shown at Washington’s Sackler Gallery. “I always felt that the gallery could not serve as a venue unless we received clear guarantees on a number of points, principally relating to security and funding. When no such guarantees were received, we concluded that we could not proceed.”
Oscars Revise Foreign Film Awards Rules
It’s actually a minor change. “Entries in the foreign language category are no longer required to be in the official language of the country submitting the film. Any language or combination of languages is acceptable, as long as the dominant one is not English.”
Paris’ Quai Branly A “Disaster”
“It is, if you will forgive a little flourish of Gallic overstatement, a catastrophe sunk in a swamp of hubris, though there is a lovely caff and ace office block in the not quite finished garden. Like many messes, it began with the noblest of intentions.”