“Newspapers used to have a monopoly on information, and it is taking them a long time to get used to the idea that they have lost it. A century ago, in every American city, various Heralds, Timeses, Tribunes and Gazettes may have competed with each other, but as a mass medium, the newspaper enjoyed total primacy. Everything about newspapering is negotiable these days: who writes, who reads, who pays, what should be covered and how. Even as they shovel the daily quota of prose, editors are pondering existential questions. What gives a newspaper its soul?”
Tag: 01.09.06
James Levine On A Roll
James Levine has turned the Metropolitan Orchestra into one of the best, and his debut season with the Boston Symphony has been acclaimed. “Even taking into account his rich career, with its long trail of megasopranos, James Levine may just now be at his absolute peak. So why won’t people in the classical-music world stop whispering, or worrying, about him?”
Preserving The Play
“We forget that the live performing arts, and particularly theatre, are more than almost anything else at the mercy of the whims of producers. It’s difficult enough, of course, to persuade anyone to mount a new play. But once that play has finished its initial run, and at best the production revived once in a subsequent season by the same theatre, even a very good play is likely to disappear into oblivion. It’s almost a unique problem.”
Defining The Producers For Oscar
The Producers’ Guild is limiting the number of producers eligible for Oscar credit. “Making the grade is important because it’s the only way the phrase ‘Oscar-winning producer’ will end up in your obituary should your film win. For the guild, it means playing bad cop, which seems appropriate given that’s what producers are often forced to do when making a film. But the organization has a bigger agenda in trying to rein in the proliferation of unearned producer credits on movies, which studios give away like freebies just to stroke egos.”
Why We Yawn
“Yawning is an ancient, primitive act. Humans do it even before they’re born, opening wide in the womb. Some snakes unhinge their jaws to do it. One species of penguins yawns as part of mating. Only now are researchers beginning to understand why we yawn, when we yawn and why we yawn back.”
A New generation Of British Arts Leaders
“In the summer of 2004, 27 curators, theatre managers and other administrators were named as the inaugural fellows of the new £1m Clore Leadership Programme, designed to tackle a perceived deficit in training for leaders in the arts. It was hoped they would provide an answer to repeated problems of poor management in major national institutions and offer an alternative to the trail of Americans, Australians and Europeans who have arrived to head everything from the South Bank Centre to Tate Modern. And, it seems, they have.”
Blockbuster’s Downfall
Bloackbuster is America’s No. 1 video rental chain. But the company is struggling and on the way out. As far the studios are concerned, other than collecting the money that Blockbuster owes them for past movies, the video chain has little relevance to their future. Viacom perspicuously divorced itself from Blockbuster by spinning it off to its shareholders, and, as one Viacom executive told me, “Blockbuster will certainly not survive and it will not be missed.” It is another zombie in Hollywood.
Joffrey’s New Chicago Highrise Home
“The Joffrey Tower, at the corner of State and Randolph streets — directly across from the flagship Marshall Field’s (soon to be Macy’s) department store — will have retail tenants on the first two floors and condominiums on floors 5 through 32. The third and fourth floors will be the new permanent home of the Joffrey Ballet, which acquired naming rights when it purchased 45,000 square feet of space. The floors will include the Joffrey administrative offices plus seven state-of-the-art rehearsal studios and a black-box theatre.”
Ohio University Killing Off 60-Year-Old Quartet?
The Oxford String Quartet is 60 years old. But its future is in doubt as Miami University of Ohio has declined to replace a departing violinist. “A group of distraught fans in Oxford, Cincinnati and as far away as Cologne, Germany, are campaigning to ‘save the quartet.’ They say the school’s prestige is at stake. But the dean of MU’s School of Fine Arts, Jose Antonio Bowen, thinks it’s a non-issue, and that eventually the school will want to emphasize other areas, such as world music.”
An Avian Duet
A group of musicians in Pittsburgh try to provoke birds into singing with them. “Some of the birds were more than just stimulated by the improvisatory serenade. A few chose to interact with the performers, who used extended techniques on their instrument to mimic bird song.”