When the name was announced back in November, Transport Minister Constance tweeted as though his hands were tied and there was nothing he could do. He said that while Ferry McFerryfacce wasn’t “everyone’s cup of tea,” the “people voted for it.” It turns out that was a lie.
Category: AUDIENCE
As Local News Outlets Disappear, Libraries Step Into The Breach
“In some cities, libraries are partnering with established news sources, teaming up in Dallas to train high schoolers in news gathering or hosting a satellite studio in Boston for the public radio station WGBH. In San Antonio, the main library offers space to an independent video news site … In smaller communities starved for local coverage, some libraries are playing a hands-on role, even if it is an expansion of traditional duties.”
So, Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Mosaic’: What Was That?
He insisted it wasn’t a “Choose your own adventure” TV miniseries/app. Instead, “it’s both a dazzlingly experimental work and a totally conventional murder mystery. It’s frank and secretive, flooding viewers with information without giving them the tools to make sense of it. The story has multiple different paths to follow but they all end up in the same place. Less a show than a television experience, it’s brilliant and exasperating.”
Libraries Are Bringing Small-Town News Values Back To Life
Sometimes the libraries become the best places for informed news on their Facebook pages, but sometimes the small-town librarians, who are already hosting chess club and movie night and tax form explainers, become newsletter or newspaper editors as well.
How The Masses Find Common Ground With Shakespeare, Through Alcohol
Well, that’s one way to be more Elizabethan: “Drunk Shakespeare is akin to watching a live version of Comedy Central’s Drunk History, only the audience is drinking along with the cast in real time — and sometimes even changing the direction of the performance.”
Why Play Readings Don’t Do What They’re Supposed To For Audiences – Or Playwrights
Play readings are, frankly, disappointing. “They’re like walking by a food truck and hearing your stomach rumble, but just when you get your wallet out the truck drives off. … It’s just people sitting there in chairs, sometimes walking up to an ugly music stand to read, and sometimes (woo-hoo!) sporadically engaging another actor at another stand. This is not inherently dramatically interesting.”
Guided Tours Are Tacky, Touristy, And The Best Way To Sightsee
Jeffrey Bloomer: “Friends offered stories of backdoor culinary tours in Istanbul down rickety staircases and through secret restaurants. I heard about guides whom you pay just to skip the line at overrun international museums but then charm you half to death anyway. And then there were many stories of guides like mine in Vermont, stewards of decidedly unexotic locations who know enough local chicanery to make every government building and local landmark feel like the seed of the next great American novel.”
Some Skepticism About “Music As A Universal Language”
“While music is universal, its meanings are not,” adds Anne Rasmussen, an ethnomusicologist at the College of William and Mary. And those meanings are created both by the people making and hearing the music, and by the entire cultural package that surrounds it. A Bach cantata that was composed to celebrate God, for example, means something very different when played in a 21st-century concert hall or in a New York deli. The meaning of music, in other words, “is not something you can perceive while listening through a pair of headphones,” says Rasmussen.
Why Should Design For Those Who Need To Do Something In A Different Way Be Ugly?
“Too often products made for people with different physical, cognitive and sensory abilities have been ugly, feebly designed and stigmatizing. They’ve been developed not by designers but by engineers. And engineers haven’t always taken their cues from people who have disabilities, the ones who know best what they need and want.
Theatre Is Hardly Even Theatre Without The Audience: Lyn Gardner
“A movie is unchanged by an audience’s presence and will continue to run in an empty auditorium. But the theatre requires a human presence in the auditorium, because it is only fully alive when it meets its audience. It is only in that moment that it bursts fully into life. … Without our presence, our engagement and our creativity the theatre dies, however talented the actors and however hard they work on stage.”