Capping a three-year effort to gain a foothold in the U.S. satellite TV market, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch has engineered the purchase of a majority share of the nation’s largest home satellite provider. Under the terms of the deal, Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns the Fox network and an extensive array of regional sports networks, will acquire 34% of DirecTV’s parent company. The deal is said to be worth $6.6 billion.
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Rosetta To Put Out Random House E-ditions
“RosettaBooks, which in 2001 angered Random House by putting out digital versions of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and other titles without the publisher’s consent, announced Wednesday it had agreed with Random House on the release of 51 e-books… Under an out-of-court settlement reached last December, Rosetta was allowed to keep publishing Sophie’s Choice and the other books and collaborate with Random House on additional releases.”
The Believer Tiptoes Into View
In recent weeks, a new magazine has begun to creep quietly onto the racks at a few select independent bookstores in the Midwest. It seems to be vaguely literary in nature, but also appears to flout a great many traditional rules of literary navel-gazing. It’s called The Believer, and yet it’s a bit unclear what its publishers might believe in. It has a manifesto instead of a title page, and makes no effort to stand out in any way, despite a clear attempt to appeal to a young, hipster literary crowd. So what is The Believer, and who is behind it? Let’s just say that the new mag is a heartbreaking periodical of staggering marketing savvy.
The Highwaymen Ride On
The South Florida artists known as the Highwaymen, who originally took up painting as a way to pick up a few extra dollars and perhaps find a way out of their poverty-stricken lives in the orange groves, are enjoying an unexpected renaissance. The artists, who focused almost exclusively on Florida landscapes as their subject matter, began painting in the late 1950s, and have turned out an astonishing volume of work over the years. Initially sold for $25-$30 apiece, a painting by one of the original Highwaymen can now sell for upwards of $10,000.
Apparently, Only Politicians Find Arts Expendable
States across the country are slashing their arts budgets to the bone in order to patch holes in their overall revenue streams. In Massachusetts, cuts to the arts are nothing new, but a recent survey suggests that the residents of the Bay State do not view these cuts as a positive development. 94% of those surveyed “consider the arts to be as important a part of basic education as math and English, and that 92 percent favor state funding for arts programs in public schools. Eighty-seven percent said that nonprofit cultural organizations were important to the quality of life in their communities, and 84 percent said they favored state funding to support public programs of cultural organizations.”
Art Is For The Elite? Don’t Tell The Brits
A new survey of workers in the UK pokes a few holes in the notion that the arts are of interest only to wealthy elites, or beyond the monetary and cultural reach of your average blue-collar guy. Among the survey’s findings: “Workers would rather have ticket concessions for art events than gym membership; nearly nine out of ten workers enjoy arts events in their free time; and just under half of those surveyed had visited the theatre in the last year (43%), while over a third of workers had been to a museum (37%), art gallery (34%) or concert (33%).”
Far East Film Fest, Hold the Far Easterners
As previously threatened, Italian government officials in the small northeastern town of Udine have told organizers of the Far East Film Festival that they must withdraw their invitations to all guests from the Far East, due to concerns about the SARS outbreak. “Although there are no travel restrictions on people from the Far East, the World Health Organisation has warned about large gatherings of people from Eastern Asian areas.”
Nureyev And The Royal – What Might Have Been
What would have happened if Rudolf Nureyev had become head of London’s Royal Ballet? Nureyev wanted the job, and Royal managing director John Tooley talked with him. “The Royal Ballet needed a new director in the mid-Seventies and approached Nureyev. Tooley remembers several discussions with him, in which Nureyev finally said that he would like the job but would also need to continue dancing. He never made any secret of his need to be on stage, but he also needed a fall-back if he proved unsuited to directing. Tooley answered that if Nureyev continued dancing to the extent he wanted, this simply wouldn’t meet the company’s needs. End of negotiations.”
NEA Chairman Dana Gioia’s view of Theatre in America:
“It cannot be a coincidence that the three greatest eras in theatre – which I would define as Athenian drama, Elizabethan drama, and 19th Century Italian opera – existed in those rare moments when all classes attended the theatre together. The dramatists had to find a way to create works that spoke across classes of people rather than flattered one particular group. So I believe we must aim high in quality and as broadly as possible in terms of audience. Anything less would be unworthy of a great public agency.”
The Kentucky Derby Of Theatre
The plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival can be surprising, but “perhaps the strangest spectacle of all is an overflowing international crowd of press, theatre pros, alumni, locals, and just-plain theatre junkies who descend on a city block of this courtly, urbane Kentucky city to binge on eight programs of nothing but new plays by living American writers.”