“Two hundred years after wandering through drifts of spring flowers in the Lake District, William Wordsworth has been given a pop video and rap version of his famous poem on daffodils. Read by a zany red squirrel in a series of dramatic mountain and lakeside locations, the hip take on the 24 lines of verse aims to lure more young people to the national park this summer.”
Tag: 04.11.06
Is It True There Are No British Intellectuals?
“The claim that Britain lacks ‘real’ intellectuals is usually based on a normative model derived primarily from France, where the term ‘intellectuels’ was applied to the members of a group of writers who supported Alfred Dreyfus in 1898. Since at least the eighteenth century, the British have constructed their national identity by contrasting themselves with the French. When the image of intellectuals as a dissident and cohesive group intimately involved in politics began to emerge in France, in the early twentieth century, it was only natural that the British should define themselves in opposing terms…”
Remembering Russes
A new documentary traces the history and legacy of the world-famous Ballet Russes, and actually brings together some of the company’s original stars for the first time in decades. “The extraordinary film splices interviews with the surviving dancers with original 16mm footage of performances and nervous, gossipy backstage moments and more than 400 archive stills, gathered from the dancers’ private collections and from trawls on eBay, which produced every Ballets Russes programme from 1933-62.”
St. Luke’s Gets $5m Endowment Boost
The New York-based Orchestra of St. Luke’s, a much-lauded ensemble made up of freelance musicians, has received an anonymous $5 million gift intended to allow the organization to start an endowment fund. “Orchestra of St. Luke’s has an annual budget of $5 million… The organization expects to raise about $280,000 this year from individuals and $250,000 to $300,000 from the board, with the rest coming from foundation gifts and ticket sales.”
Is TV’s Future Online?
As traditional TV viewership (especially for the Big Four broadcast networks) continues to decline, networks are scrambling to find alternate methods of delivering content to consumers. “Six months after ABC struck the first deal to sell commercial-free TV episodes online, networks are rushing to offer everything from individual programs to season subscriptions. Web viewers can even watch some shows for free — with advertising.”
Facelift For Toronto PAC
Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts is getting a $3 million overhaul, which the center’s board hopes will reinvigorate its mission as well as its image. “The centre, conceived as one of Canada’s Centennial projects, opened in 1970. It is home to seven resident companies — including the Canadian Stage Company — and is used by more than 50 other arts and community organizations annually.”
Boeing Gives $15m To Smithsonian
“The Boeing Co. and the Smithsonian Institution announced yesterday that the aviation giant is giving $15 million to the National Air and Space Museum. The gift, the largest corporate gift in Smithsonian history, will go to the planned expansion of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the Virginia annex of the main museum on the Mall.”
Running With The Crowd
The nationwide rallies this week calling for equal rights for immigrants both legal and illegal made for some stunning pictures, as hundreds of thousands of marchers turned out in cities across the US. The experience has Philip Kennicott thinking about the meaning of crowds, and the sometimes contradictory ideas they embody. “The crowd image generally reflects the latent fears inspired by those who have gathered in the streets… Just as the eye scans the multitudes in a Bruegel painting, the lens scans the crowd, and finds it festive or restive, attentive or dull, emotional or over-passionate. But those are really metaphors: The individual stands for the crowd.”
Filmmaker Vilgot Sjoman, 81
“Vilgot Sjoman, a Swedish filmmaker whose notoriously risqué I Am Curious (Yellow), made in 1967 for $160,000, sufficiently alarmed censors to generate millions at the box office and jump-start a new cinematic explicitness, died on Sunday at a Stockholm hospital. He was 81.”
Crowding The Shelves
“Birds travel in flocks, fish in schools. Sometimes books arrive in cohorts, too, testing the attention spans of booksellers, reviewers and, most of all, readers… For publishers and authors, these pileups can lead to a scramble to distinguish their books from the pack, with moved release dates and changed marketing plans. Authors battle to snag talk-show spots. Book reviews often pair books, and booksellers clump them onto a themed table. For readers, this can create confusion, or worse, fatigue.”