“Everyone has always had an opinion, but now those opinions find ample display space on the Web. As for movie marketing, the dynamics haven’t just changed, they’ve been transformed — by the Web and TV, as well as the pervasive and pernicious use of focus groups (thank you for that, marketing consultants), and by stupendous marketing budgets, justified by the global economy, that pound every head in the cosmos with news of the latest studio release. What these writers neglect to mention, however, is the awkward issue of quality.”
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Peer Pressure – The New Critical Mass
“Expert opinion in the media used to drive culture. Now, it’s peer recommendations. Already, consumers can sample a broader range of critical opinion on the Internet — some of it relevant and thoughtful, covering products that wouldn’t ordinarily be reviewed by the mainstream media, and some of it biased or one-dimensional. And marketers, such as movie studios and book publishers, are trying to figure out how Internet tastemakers figure into their relationship with their customers.”
A Jazz Fest That Means So Much More
Everyone’s watching this year’s Jazz Fest in New Orleans for signs of the city’s recovery. “Music in New Orleans has always been entertaining, but never just entertainment. It held on to cultural memories, negotiated between Old and New World aesthetics, and bound together families, neighborhoods and communities. It’s party music, but it’s also a secular ritual. And while the city has spawned far more than its share of gifted musicians, its music was not created from the top down.”
Dromgoole Takes On The Globe
Dominic Dromgoole hasn’t distinguished himself as a producer of the Bard’s works. And yet here he is running London’s Globe Theatre. “For all his excitement, the idea of Dromgoole, 42, running the Globe is going to take some getting used to – and he’s got a lot to prove. The role was previously filled by the sensitive actor Mark Rylance, who bashfully attributed the Globe’s unexpected box-office success – generating an annual pre-tax profit of £1.5 million – to the ensemble effort rather than his own stellar contribution.”
What Does It mean When Wrong Is Used More Than Right?
Ancient English cliches and expressions are being mangled by the culture of cut and paste and the spread of unchecked writing on the internet. According to the Oxford English Corpus, a database of a billion words, dozens of traditional phrases are now more commonly misspelled than rendered correctly in written English.”
N’Orleans – Rebirth Or Atlantis?
New Orleans’ JazzFest is being touted as the rebirth of a great American city. “Yet as the tourists tuck in to crawfish Monica and fried turkey po’boys, you can’t help wondering what this joyous celebration at the city’s race track — largely unscathed in the storm — really means. Is it about the rebirth of a community through the power of music — or could it just be the last hurrah of an environmental basket-case which the pessimists are tipping as ‘America’ s Atlantis’, the first city to be drowned by global warming?”
Rap – Just About The Money?
“Many of the performers at the three-day Trinity International Hip-Hop Festival in Hartford, Connecticut, were critical of the way that US rap – which is by far the best-selling – appears concerned mostly with money, drugs and sex, and has little to do with its roots in the angry political expression of groups like Public Enemy or KRS One.”
Time’s 100: Kiki Smith
Kiki, 52, embraces craft, the dreaded C word of the art world. In myriad materials such as glass, fiber and beads (some associated more with amateurs and craft-show practitioners than with professional artists), she has embraced a dizzyingly diverse vocabulary of the demoted, debased and despised—and she makes you like it.
Bedtime Stories – Not When You’re 12
“According to a a survey, parents start out reading to small children but abandon it as they grow up, to the point where just 3% of children aged 12 say they are read to every day.”
Time Warp – A Seattle Museum Takes A Giant Leap
Charles and Emma Frye were Seattle collectors with reactionary Old World taste in painting. They left behind a flawed collection with a seriously large $92 million endowment, and now the institution’s new handlers have jumped both feet into the 21st Century with advnturous shows. “What is the frye’s core audience thinking? In a twinkling, rip van winkle became a wide-awake laboratory of contemporary experiment. Put another way, the frye time-traveled from a stuffy 19th century to a progressive 21st, without stopping, even to refuel, in the 20th.”