Traditional buildings of justice are meant to awe. But “like most of its modernist forebears, the new Bronx Hall of Justice, designed by Raphael Viñoly, seeks to humanize our interaction with the forces of law.”
Tag: 01.02.06
At Amazon, ‘Prices Go Up, Prices Go Down’
“Imagine this: You go to a bookstore, browse, choose a couple of volumes. But you don’t want to carry the books around. So you ask the clerk to hold the tomes until Saturday, when you’ll come back to buy them. When you return, the bookseller hands you the items but advises you that he’s raised the prices. ‘I knew you were hot to buy them,’ the clerk says, ‘so I figured I could make a few extra bucks.’ That’s what it feels like online bookseller Amazon.com Inc. has been doing to me.”
The Popcorn Economy
It’s tough sledding owning a movie theatre these days. Hollywood squeezes you for every dollar they can get from ticket sales and forces you to show long preview reels that lengthen screening times; advertisers clamor for access, and will pay handsomely for it, but they insist on having the volume turned up to insane levels in order to insure that the audience can’t ignore the commercials; and then there are those damnable “serious” filmmakers, who insist on making movies that run longer than 128 minutes, or worse, giving their films engaging plotlines that encourage moviegoers to stay in their seats rather than heading to the concession stand to refill their barrel of popcorn and vat of pop.
The Big Business Of Art theft
The Art Loss Register lists 160,000 stolen works of art. “Art theft is big business. Interpol reckons that it ranks fourth among the highest-value criminal activities, after drugs, arms smuggling and money laundering. The FBI puts its value at $5 billion a year.”
Starz To Offer Downloadable Movies
The premium cable channel Starz is offering movies for download on demand. “The service, dubbed “Vongo,” is available for a monthly subscription of $9.99 and will eventually include more than 1,000 movies, short films and other programs. The films will be available at the same time they are offered on the Starz premium movie cable channel, about five to six months after they are released on DVD.”
Dreams For British Dance
Ismene Brown has plenty of dreams for UK dance – starting with: “Wales at last has its own ballet company, and the new Welsh National Ballet, linking up with Welsh National Opera in lively opera-ballet bills, soon establishes an individual artistic identity, as Birmingham Royal Ballet and Northern Ballet Theatre have done in the Midlands and the North.”
Cultural Rehab
Newcastle and Gateshead are the poster cities for cultural renewal. “Gone is almost all the industry – steel, coal, warehouses, shipyards, docks – that made this one of the world’s great manufacturing centres. Instead of a culture based on the dignity of labour and trade is a theme park of heritage sites and palaces of art, liberally sprinkled with restaurants and cafés. Nineteenth-century industry has been transformed into 21st-century leisure. They call it urban regeneration, and here they’ve invented a new civic identity to characterise it – NewcastleGateshead.”
Why Are British Universities Segregated?
“The figures on the ethnicity of students at higher education institutions for 2003-04, provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa), reveal a deeply worrying racial divide among British universities. There are 53 institutions with less than 5% ethnic minority students. About 20 institutions have more than 40%.”
The Movie Numbers Game
How is it that movie box office numbers for the weekend are announced before the weekend is over? “These box-office ‘results’ released over the weekend are simply a studio’s own estimate of its movie’s weekend performance. Distribution executives arise at dawn on Sunday mornings to crunch their numbers and report them to the media. Making a weekend projection on a Sunday morning is quite similar to how the media call political elections when they have the results of only a handful of precincts: You compare the numbers you have against some past results to make an educated guess.”
“Phantom’s” Record Run
This month, Phantom of the Opera will have played continuously on Broadway longer than any other show in history – 18 years. And three of the original cast members are still performing in the show. “After a special gala performance on Jan. 9, “Phantom” will have been performed 7,486 times, one more than “Cats,” which closed five years ago.”