Cleveland voters go to the polls tuesday to vote on a measure that would provide $100 million for economic development. “Half the money would underwrite job creation, worker training and retraining, brownfield cleanup and business start-ups. The other half would go to cultural groups and artists through a county-run grant process involving the review of applicants by panels of community leaders and out-of-region arts experts.”
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The Next Big Thing – Web Critics?
Some online movie critics have hundreds of thousands of readers, more than many print publications. But “though their readership is growing, online film critics remain at the bottom of the movie-publicity food chain — far below daily newspaper critics, magazine writers and broadcast reporters. They are the last to be invited for preview screenings, are seldom quoted in movie ads and remain largely off the radar for Hollywood studios.”
Playing Tag With The Movies
At the movies, “2003 was an off year for copy lines, those punchy epigrams printed above or below the film’s title in posters and ads. As studios compete in an increasingly cluttered media landscape, a good line, according to one marketing exec, is needed to reinforce that one iconic image.”
Attacking The Idea Of The Creative Class
Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” ideas have been widely embraced in America. But there’s a backlash, and he is “taking political hits from the right and the left “There is just one problem: The basic economics behind [Florida’s] ideas don’t work,” writes one critic. Another “calls Florida’s city-revitalization theory ‘so wrong and backward that it reads like satire.’ Florida has mistaken the side effects of a booming economy for the causes of growth. After all, ‘Potemkin bohemias’ are not going to get old steel cities humming again.”
Baroque On The Record
Boston Baroque’s recordings with Telarc will never earn back the money it takes to make them. But there are other advantages: “The records have invigorated our audience, and the reception the records have earned — including three Grammy nominations — has changed us from a local into a national and international ensemble. The recordings have led to invitations to tour in Europe and in America. We have five weekends a year to say `Come and hear us,’ but the recordings can introduce us to people all the time. And the recordings have had a tremendous impact on the musicians. The intensity of the recording process is a lot different than rehearsing a concert and presenting it. And of course through recordings, the group can hear itself.”
When Twyla Met Billy Joel
Twyla Tharp didn’t have to spend much time convincing Billy Joel to let her use his music for an evening-long show. “It was like archeology. I treated the songs as shards, pieces of pots that had been pulled out of the ground, and I had to reconstruct the whole pot. My other concept was something called living newspapers. It was a short-lived form of American theater — Orson Welles, among others, practiced it. They took subject matter like electricity, water, labor, and bulked dramatic evenings out of these concepts, and I had the feeling that I would do this with the conflict of war.”
Wrong Building, Wrong Place, Wrong Time
How is it that a new £34 million community sports center was so badly planned that it had to be closed down? “if you seek political hubris, overarching architectural ambition, millennial folly and evidence of the decline of local authority expertise in one building, this is where you should come. This is the sad yet instructive story of the municipal swimming pool that sank.”
Pop Music’s Changing Demographic
Used to be that kids bought the most music. But “for the first time, people in their 40s are buying more albums than teenagers. According to recent figures from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the 12-to-19 age group accounted for 16.4% of album sales in 2002, a sharp fall on 2000 (22.1%), while 40- to-49-year-olds went the other way, rising from 16.5% to 19.1%. Buyers in their 50s (14.3%) are not far behind. Soon, half of albums will be bought by people who have passed their 40th birthday.”
What’s “Authentic” About Tevye?
“With the arrival of a new production of “Fiddler on the Roof” on Broadway, some commentators have again assumed that the show’s value lies in its authenticity. Early responses to the revival have gone so far as to count the Jewish names in the cast and crew, noting incredulously that even the role of Tevye is played by a non-Jewish actor, Alfred Molina. This is hardly surprising: the further removed we are from the Old World, the more we long to recapture it. But what is surprising is that the pseudo-klezmer tunes and schmaltz-laden accents in “Fiddler” were ever assumed to be the real thing.”
A Cultural Wave – Gay Marriage
Gay marriage is an inevitable social certainty, writes Frank Rich. “The polls find a clear majority of those ages 18 to 29 in favor of same-sex marriage. In America, generational turnover is destiny — especially when it’s plugged into capitalism. In a country where only half the families are intact heterosexual marriages with children, those that break the old mold are a huge developing market — for weddings, tourism, housing and anything else American ingenuity can conjure up for consumption.”