“You can’t really pay much attention to anything else while you’re reading, so in order to play with any of these new features, you have to stop reading. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, then the attentional tug of all these peripheral doodads is vaguely annoying, and if you’re not engaged by the story, they aren’t enough on their own to win you over.”
Tag: 02.02.12
Wilton’s Music Hall In London Out Of Danger (For Now)
The historic but dilapidated venue – the very last of England’s old music halls, and the venue for several of London’s best-known experimental productions in recent years – was in danger of having to close for safety’s sake after failing to secure Lottery funding for repairs. Now a little-known government trust has contributed £700,000, enabling the first stage o renovations to begin.
The Asianization Of Classical Music
“Despite classical’s deserved reputation as the whitest of genres, Asian attendance rates match or surpass the national average up through the 45- 54 age range. To put it one way, the younger the classical audience gets, the more Asian it becomes. To put it another, the only population that is disproportionately filling seats being vacated by old people dying off is Asians.”
Do We Still Need Major Record Labels?
“It’s true the internet has been brilliant for artists in many ways, giving them an alternative route to make contact with and sell directly to fans, but record labels do much more than distribute to retailers.”
How Classical Music Can Take Advantage In A New Surge In Interest
Up until now the implications for former “niche” genres – classical, jazz, world – have been largely overlooked. In a world where listeners no longer define themselves along firm genre lines, music is increasingly just that – music. As a result, we are now witnessing a musician-led movement gleefully adopted by listeners, in which classical is being rebranded from the ground up. Even the term “classical” itself seems obsolete in the face of what’s being produced and consumed.
Survey: TV Viewers Want Better Actor Credits
“According to the survey, the majority of television viewers believe credits are important for both actors and audiences and more than half would like to see credits available online as well as on television.”
Artist Mike Kelley, 57
“An influential Los Angeles artist whose physically messy and psychologically complex projects laid the groundwork for present-day installation art, has died. He was 57. He was found dead Tuesday evening at his home in South Pasadena in what several friends described as a suicide following a serious depression.”
Wislawa Szymborska, 88, Nobel Prize-Winning Poet
“She was popular in Poland, which tends to make romantic heroes of poets, but she was little known abroad. Her poems were clear in topic and language, but her playfulness and tendency to invent words made her work hard to translate.”