Artists can perform where they want now in Miami Beach. “Miami Beach has lost a significant round in its years-long effort to regulate street performers. Last month, a judge declared unconstitutional a city ordinance limiting performers and artists to 11 locations throughout the city. Under the ordinance, only two performers are allowed at each location, chosen by lottery every three months from scores of applicants.”
Blog
American TV’s Clutter Grows
Promos, ads and other filler has proliferated on American TV. “According to a recent report in Media Life, an online magazine, the major networks now offer one minute of “clutter” for every two minutes of legitimate entertainment during prime time. Or put in another context, the Big Four (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) air about 52 minutes of commercials and promotional material during three hours of prime time. This is up 8 percent from 2000 and a whopping 36 percent since 1991.”
The Depressed Aussie Film Industry
“A soaring Australian dollar, staunch competition from Canada, eastern Europe and New Zealand, the impending US-Australia Free Trade Agreement and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California have cast a dark shadow over the Australian film industry.”
The Dirt On The High-Kicking Rockettes
A former Rockette dishes up the backstage dirt about the Christmas show. Stories about “the vodka-soaked pineapple chunks the dancers pop as they come onstage, the stagehands with fake salamis down their pants, and the endless chattering on stage, about sales at Macy’s, during the Toy Soldiers number. ‘You’re 30 yards away from the audience. There’s a lot going on that nobody hears or sees.’ That would include the camel dung, regularly deposited by the animal talent during the manger scene. (What are you gonna do, fire the camel?)”
French Film Award Judges Get Self-Destructing DVD Screeners
Voters for the French Cesar film awards will be getting DVD copies of the movies that self-destruct. “The DVD of Gus Van Sant’s film Elephant turns black and becomes unusable with two days of being played, reports industry website Screen Daily. The DVDs, which are designed to be disposable, will be sent to members of France’s Academie des Arts et Techniques du Cinema, said the report.”
An Idea – Pay TV Viewers To Go Digital?
In the UK, plans are for all TV broadcasts to be digital by 2010. But the only way to get some viewers to switch might be to pay them. “There were only two ways of making everyone switch to a digital source, such as a set-top digital box, cable or satellite. One is to pay people to switch, the other is to force them.”
Edinburgh’s Brain Drain
“New figures reveal that Edinburgh has been overtaken by Glasgow as Scotland’s cultural capital. In the most comprehensive attempt to map changes in Scotland’s cultural employment in the first years of devolution, researchers found Edin burgh was undergoing a massive brain drain of creative talent.”
Winn: Breaking Out Of The Basic Newspaper Arts Review
A panel at the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors in St. Petersburg, Fla got to talking about the state of arts coverage in daily newspapers. Steven Winn – arts writer at the San Francisco Chronicle: “Over the years, I felt a kind of creeping alienation. No one but a critic attends the theater 150 times a year. I was becoming, gradually and inexorably, self referential. I wrote about theater in terms of other theater, because that was what I was living.”
Book Town’s A Success – But Can The Locals Afford It?
The experiment that transformed Blaenavon into a town of book shops has been a big success. But now, can the locals afford to live there? “A year ago anyone who suggested that the same thing could happen in Blaenavon, valley of the squinting plywood, would have been laughed all the way back down the mountain to the M4. Property in the town was in terrible condition, but cheap as chips. Now much of it is still in terrible condition, but you get far fewer chips to the pound. Local people stand in front of the estate agents, staring at the photographs, their jaws dropping.”
RA: Loved The Lloyd-Webber Show
Critics hated the Royal Academy’s show of Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s art. One wrote: “Really useless. Why can’t the man keep his private collection of saccharine Victorian art private?” But more than 226,000 people – an average of 2,693 a day – paid to see his treasures. The doorstep-sized catalogue (£15 paperback, £35 hardback) had to be reprinted three times.” The show turns out to be one of the RA’s most popular exhibitions of the past decade.