“This year IFC will release about 100 films ‘on demand’, meaning they can be called up for a fee in most households that get their television via cable or satellite. … Later this year IFC plans to launch a new on-demand channel to showcase documentary films. Cinetic, a powerful independent-film broker, will also get into the game this summer. Most radical of all is Magnolia,” which will release the Jeff Daniels comedy The Answer Man on cable four weeks before its theatrical opening.
Tag: 05.21.09
Credo In Nullum Deum: Belief In Unbelief
“[S]ecular rationalists have held one tenet in common: religion belongs to the infancy of the species; the more modern a society becomes, the less room there is for religious belief and practice. … At bottom, the assertion that religion is destined to die out is [itself] a confession of faith.”
U Michigan Gets A Better Deal From Google
“The new Google-UM agreement (.pdf) gives the university a digital copy of every book on its shelves, regardless of whether Google scanned its copy or another library’s. The school gets more rights to distribute its copies of the digitized works, and, most importantly for Google public relations, a way for the school to protest the pricing scheme of full-text institutional subscriptions to the millions of digitized books.”
How The Internet Changed The Music Business
“The biggest problem a band has is getting its music heard. For years, the music industry was confined to four multinational corporations that dominated the revenue stream of 70% of the music coming in, and four or five radio conglomerates that controlled what music was going out. Now all that has been broken up into millions and millions of little pieces and subcultures and niches that are serving small, really dedicated communities of music lovers.”
A Push To Rescue Marcel Marceau’s Stuff
“Marcel Marceau is at the centre of a row over France’s cultural heritage. A Paris court has ordered that the extraordinary contents of his rural home be auctioned off at bargain prices next week to settle his debts. The mime, who died two years ago aged 84, had gone into receivership after ploughing all his money into theatre projects. The French arts world is up in arms and begging the government to buy Marceaus’ mime paraphernalia to Âpreserve it for history’s sake.”
Classical Music And Race – A Long Way To Go
“When you have minority artists, instrumentalists and singers in the national and international spotlight, what they go through that’s extra-musical is tremendous… No one considers what people of color have to go through before they even have a chance to walk onstage.”
Where Are New York’s Alternative Theatre Spaces?
“If only New York could get reattached to grander displays. We have any number of dramatic sites – warehouses, piers, decrepit ballrooms, deserted subway stations. It’s time we took theatre back to the streets.”
Beijing’s Empty Bird’s Nest Stadium Looks To The Arts For Help
Since the Summer Games ended in August, Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium has suffered a fate that is all too common among former Olympic venues around the world: neglect. A lack of bookings means the stadium (designed by Herzog & de Meuron) remains empty most of the time. Business is so meager that there are even plans to turn parts of the structure into a shopping center. So today’s news that Chinese auteur Zhang Yimou will restage his famous production of Puccini’s “Turandot” at the stadium in October comes as a noteworthy development.
Reconsidering Frank Lloyd Wright (Sorta)
Wright proselytized for a humanistic, nature-focused organic architecture, but it turned into a dead end. He was ever the alpha dog and couldn’t edit his endless ideas to found a truly new architecture. You can’t clearly trace his influence, the way you can with the Bauhaus.
Minnesota Gets Kushner-Mania
“Tony Kushner is revered in the theater world and has been anointed a Great American Playwright. But despite a career that has in recent years expanded into screenwriting, his name is not as familiar as past Goliaths of the nation’s theater such as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller or, more recently, Edward Albee, David Mamet or the late August Wilson.”