The dance company is out of a home after this season. The mogul – Stan Kroenke, owner of the Avalanche, Nuggets, Mammoth, and assorted sports palaces and theatres, needs attractions to fill his Paramount Theatre. “Under the proposal, Kroenke Sports Enterprises will take over the ballet and move it to the Paramount Theatre, which Kroenke has under a 25-year lease. Ballet and sports aren’t that far apart. Both require physical skills and stamina.”
Tag: 01.06.03
Blocking Your Digital Future
The movie industry is close to telling cable TV operators to block recording of movies. The technology is aleady in place. “Hollywood’s new strategy is likely to affect everyone from computer-adept users of online music services to the average couch potato. The digital future, hailed as more convenient and of higher quality than the scratchy, fuzzy analog past, is coming with multiple strings attached.”
La Scala Proposes Controversial Expansion
In the midst of a major (and controversial) renovation, Milan’s La Scala proposes a big expansion, including a series of new theatre spaces. “It is an odd time to propose an expansion, with budget deficits at the major opera houses and shrinking public funding for culture in Italy. And indeed, the motives behind the project may not be purely artistic. Local observers believe that La Scala is collaborating with real estate developers who seek to enrich themselves at the ultimate expense of taxpayers.”
Solzhenitsyn Suffers Stroke? Heart Attack?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 84, has been in a Moscow hospital since the end of December. He is said to have “spent the past few days there and was ‘already feeling better’. Conflicting reports from Russian news agencies had suggested the writer was suffering from – variously – a stroke, hypertension or angina.”
Why Are We Stuck With Poor Old Washed-Up CD’s?
“To the new generation of music artists and engineers, ‘CD-quality sound’ is an ironic joke. In recording studios, today’s musicians produce their works digitally at resolutions far beyond the grainy old CD standard. To make the sounds listenable on antiquarian CD players, the final mix is retrofitted to compact disc specs by stripping it of billions of bits’ worth of musical detail and dynamics. It’s like filming a movie in IMAX and then broadcasting it only to black-and-white TV sets. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
The Auteur’s Soap Commercials (Gotta Pay The Rent)
What did art filmmaker Ingmar Bergman do in the 1950s when he was short of cash? He made soap commercials. “He had eight children to feed, a long-running strike had paralysed the Swedish film industry, and theatres were closed for the summer. He needed to work. It was inevitable that film historians would track down the missing films…”
Plagiarism Bad. Very Bad. Isn’t It?
At a “professor-packed” session of the American Historical Association’s meeting in Chicago over the weekend, plagiarism was the hot topic. “Almost everybody thinks that something ought to be done about it, but almost nobody agrees with anybody else about just what that something ought to be. And – oh, yes – there’s also that annoying bugaboo of defining just what truly constitutes plagiarism.”
Record Concert Tour Year Nets $2.1 Billion
The pop music concert industry sold a record number of tickets in 2002, taking in $2.1 billion. “This was the fourth straight year concert receipts reached record levels in America. There were $1.75 billion in sales in 2001. Paul McCartney had the top-grossing tour, pulling in $103 million, with average ticket prices at $130.
Bootleg Nation (So What If It’s Illegal)
“With a minimum of online searching, fans of virtually any band from arena-filling superstars to cult-worshiped club acts, can find a Web site or electronic mailing list to feed a habit for live CD’s. Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen? No problem. Illicit recordings, or bootlegs, of their concerts circulate soon after the last car leaves the parking lot. But a show by the singer-songwriter Dirk Hamilton or the electronica musician Luke Vibert? Also no sweat. In the music world, you’re nobody until somebody loves you enough to want your bootlegs.”
Former KGB Spies Offer Anti-Piracy Plan
A group of foermer KGB spies is offering recording companies a new “watermarking” technology to protect their music from music pirates. This month a music distrbutor “will introduce watermarking technology developed by former Russian spies in St Petersburg, in the hope of attracting more music companies on to the web.