When you think of a film festival, you probably picture crowded city streets, with sleek, gritty, and urbane theatres screening cutting-edge films with unusual camera angles. What you probably don’t think of is a barn 40 miles south of Duluth, Minnesota. “The barn’s mow is permeated with the aura of old-time agriculture. It’s also, as the site of the 2005 Free Range Film Festival, outfitted with high-end sound and projection equipment, rows of chairs and old couches, and a 24-by-14-foot movie screen made from an old billboard… And they won’t just show two days of films about rural life. This year the festival received 70 submissions, from places as far-flung as Italy, Australia, and Grand Rapids.”
Blog
Elektra Too Pricey For Houston
The Houston Symphony, which has been struggling with deficits for several years, has cancelled plans for a concert version of Richard Strauss’s opera, Elektra, and replaced it with a program of operatic excerpts, which will be considerably cheaper to put on. The orchestra has also cancelled a planned new series of concerts designed to draw new audiences with theme concerts and onstage commentary.
Does NJ Arts Funding Favor Democrats?
In New Jersey, where political corruption is as ordinary as summer rain, the state arts board last week announced its annual dispensation of funds, and immediately, a question arose. Why exactly would such a large percentage of the overall funding be going to counties with a preference for Democratic legislators, while Republican counties were generally underfunded? Members of the arts board “lacked specifics as to why groups in one county got more than another, beyond that their applications may have been more noteworthy. They stressed politics plays no role and said evaluators are experts.” Some others in the state theorized that the Republican counties are less urban, and their arts groups less sophisticated at writing grant proposals.
Is Less Classical Music Really A Problem?
Rupert Christiansen has plowed through Blair Tindall’s supposedly scandalous new book, and is most intrigued with the author’s assessment of the state of the classical music industry. “A glut of young musicians were groomed to enter a profession that was both puffed up and weighed down with its own status and restrictive practices… [But] too much of the recent debate about classical music has focused on the decline in the quantity of performance or the size of audience, compared with the levels achieved in that brief post-war boom. Yet the quality of music-making should also be considered, and surely nobody who heard the Royal Opera’s Die Walküre or John Eliot Gardiner’s Nelson Mass at the Proms last week could come away worrying about a decline in standards.”
Reaching For The Sky (Terrorism Be Damned)
Following the 9/11 attacks, commentators and prognosticators swore up and down that this would mark the end of the global quest to have the tallest building dominating a city skyline. It hasn’t worked out that way. “Architecture buffs revel in the lore of such competition, recalling how the Chrysler Building beat out the Bank of Manhattan tower in 1929 with the last-minute hoisting of a secretly planned stainless steel top. In 1931, of course, the Chrysler was bested by the Empire State Building, which yielded the title to the World Trade Center four decades later… For all the talk about jitters deterring potential tenants of a future Freedom Tower, the 9/11 terrorist attack has done little or nothing to diminish a global appetite to touch the sky.”
Today’s War, Today’s Television
The question for filmmakers and TV executives following some horrific global event or, worse, a full-fledged war, is always the same: how much time is enough? How long until the public will be ready to be entertained by this subject? Usually, the answer is measured in years, which makes Stephen Bochco’s new series groundbreaking on its face. Bochco is attempting to tell the stories of the still highly controversial Iraq war while the conflict is still going on.
Black Theatre In The UK Looks To Move Forward
England’s Arts Council has denied a funding request for a new dedicated black theatre called Talawa, setting off a storm of criticism from the company. But not everyone is sure the council’s decision will hurt black theatre in London. “While nobody in the black theatre community… is glad to see the project fail, and all express concern about Talawa’s now uncertain future, many see this as an opportunity to reassess the needs of black theatre in Britain when its profile is undergoing significant changes.”
On The Plus Side, Hypocrisy Has A New ‘Exhibit A’
Conceptual artist Mark McGowan has been informed by London’s water board that, if he does not dismantle his latest installation, which consists of a tap running continuously and the water swirling down a drain, the board will cut off water service to the entire gallery in which the work is being displayed. McGowan’s intention was to highlight waste, which one could argue he has now done quite effectively, pouring some 800,000 litres of water into the London sewers in the midst of one of the worst droughts southeast England has seen in decades. The tap was originally meant to run for an entire year.
News Flash: File Traders Are Actually Music Fans!
“Computer-literate music fans who illegally share tracks over the internet also spend four and a half times as much on digital music as those who do not, according to research published today. The survey confirms what many music fans have informally insisted for some time: that downloading tracks illegally has also led them to become more enthusiastic buyers of singles and albums online. Unlikely to be music to the ears of record companies, who have previously argued the opposite, the results will raise a question mark over the companies’ recent drive to pursue individual file sharers through the courts.”
The Penguin Smell Really Should Have Been A Giveaway
American artist Wayne Hill thought he was making a fairly plain and obvious statement when he returned from a trip to the Antarctic with two bottles of water melted from the ice shelf, and arranged to exhibit them as a comment on global warming. As it turns out, the work was a bit too subtle for one thirsty visitor, who apparently chugged the lot.