When she was 10 years old, Sarah Polley starred in Terry Gilliam’s “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen”. Seventeen years later she recalls the experience as terrifying, and, upon hearing that Gilliam is shooting another movie with a young Canadian actress, writes to tell him of her traumas back then.
Blog
Music Downloader… er Aggregator Expands The Music Pool
A new music aggregator on the internet feeds you music from a data store of 3 million tunes. “Listening to Mercora is like tapping into a million iPods all at once. You can control what you listen to, returning to the search engine after each tune to select your next cut, or you can open yourself to the choices and discoveries of whatever random music lover happens to have been playing the tune you first sought.”
Avoiding The “M” Word
A venerable superstition has struck again — that it’s bad luck for theater artists to utter the name “Macbeth.” Amanda McBroom’s solo show opening off-Broadway has had the word deleted from its title. “People are afraid of the word. The arcana is intense.”
In LA: A School Building Boom That Disappoints
The Los Angeles School District is in the midst of an enormous building campaign – spending more than $17 billion on schools. “Certainly the district deserves praise for confronting, after years of official neglect, the twin problems of overcrowding and aging facilities. The building campaign’s central goals — to move every student back to a traditional two-semester calendar and into a neighborhood school — are finally within sight. But as the district has become more aggressive about asking for money and tackling new lists of educational problems, on the design front it has shrunk into caution and insularity.”
Country Music Kicks Butt On Tour
Country music is having a great year on the touring circuit. “While other genres struggle to maintain superstars and develop new headliners, country music has been performing extremely well on both fronts, particularly for the past two years. Last year, five country acts were among the top 25 touring acts for the year, following a long dry spell when the genre was lucky to have one or two acts among touring’s elite. Country’s current boom stems from a premise that is often forgotten by much of the concert industry: Offer great talent at a fair price in an appealing setting, and fans will respond.”
Is Russia The Next Big Art Market?
“Russia and its nascent art market is the new Eldorado for art dealers. Moscow accounts for at least 85% of the country’s wealth and soaring oil prices are further boosting revenues. The city is plastered with billboards advertising luxury brands, new buildings are being hastily erected everywhere and out in the Western suburbs, a $60 million shopping mall is rising amid the birch forests: it is surrounded by $20 million homes. Dealers and decorators are scrambling to furnish these empty homes, as well as properties in the South of France and London, both obligatory for Russia’s super-rich.”
La Scala Dancers Strike
After the famed opera house’s renovation, “the dancers say their dressing rooms are too small and they are being squeezed out in order to make more room for the orchestra.”
A Thing About Gershwin
Gershwin’s Concerto in F is getting its regular-season premiere at the Boston Symphony (the piece had always been relegated to the Pops season). Why has Gershwin’s much-loved “serious” music taken so long to be embraced by symphony orchestras?
What Does The New Vegas Broadway Mean?
“If it isn’t already, Las Vegas will soon be the second city of Broadway, home to more New York musicals than any market outside Manhattan. If Broadway shows went to Vegas instead of touring, what would happen to the traditional road theaters and their customers? More saliently, what would happen to their backers, who are often investors in New York productions? If they were outflanked by casino operators, how would that alter the kinds of shows that make it to Broadway in the first place? For even though the tail of touring had to some degree wagged the dog of Broadway for years, Vegas now threatened to clone a new dog entirely. A big dog with sequins.”
Anonymous Five
The lack of any marquee names on this year’s shortlist for the Giller Prize could be seen as a PR misstep, especially since the CBC lockout virtually guarantees that the award will not be televised for the first time in recent memory. But where there are no superstars, everyone becomes a frontrunner, and the unusual shortlist could also be a unique opportunity for fresh new literary voices to emerge from the vast sea of Canadian literature.