What were publishers thinking about at last week’s annual BookExpo? “Lower prices were on many people’s minds at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where BookExpo America, the industry’s annual national gathering, ended Sunday. Publishers and booksellers agreed that in a slow economy they needed to find ways to conform to the budgets of their customers. With hardcovers often costing $25 or higher, publishers are cutting the price of some hardcover editions and going straight to paperback.”
Tag: 06.05.03
NY: Will Standardized Arts Education Requirements Help?
Arts education in public schools in New York City is haphazard.”It’s completely hodgepodge. We have in some schools almost no arts, in many schools no music, schools that are not taking advantage of the cultural resources of the city, arts educators who may be asked to decorate the school for Halloween.” Now the schools chancellor has proposed a standardized arts regime for the city.
Korean Theatres Must Show Korean Movies
The South Korean government denies it is thinking about easing a law that forces Korean movie theatres to show Korean movies 40 percent of the time. “The screen quota is not just an issue for the film industry, it is vital to the future of our visual media industry as a whole. If we lower our guards on film, then the rest of the market is lost.”
Exploring American Music In Its Many Flaovors
Minnesota Public Radio’s American Mavericks series is a collection of first-rate radio shows about American music. But it’s also a valuable website, the “latest attempt to find a home on the Internet for progressive classical music, which is played sparingly in concert and on the radio. “For Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony’s music director and co-host of the “American Mavericks” radio series, the Internet is a logical place for young people to discover new music. Just as cutting-edge composers push beyond common assumptions, he said, a certain adventurous nature is needed to explore cyberspace.”
The End Of Music As Object?
“I believe the era in which music is treated as an almost fetishistic object of desire is coming to an end. Not for me, perhaps, even though I have been busy recently uploading my entire music collection to my computer, clearing acres of valuable shelf-space by transforming stacks of CDs (never the most beloved format, with their easily cracked plastic boxes, tiny covers and tatty booklets full of microscopic print) into digital sound files on a kind of virtual juke box. And quite possibly it is not yet over for you, either, certainly if you grew up in the vinyl era and have developed a soft spot for albums with distinct identities, the running order of songs identified on the sleeve, just as the artist intended. But it is a very different situation for the teenage students…”