“A number of London’s West End theatres are to boost their security to counter worsening audience behaviour, owners have said. It comes after reports of drunkenness and even fights during performances. … The deteriorating behaviour is being blamed on cheap tickets, attracting younger audiences, and a liberal attitude to alcohol in theatres.”
Tag: 08.03.09
The Great Literary Con Of 2004 (Which No One Noticed)
Five years ago, Modernism/Modernity, “the quarterly of the Modernist Studies Association, ran a review essay of the writer David Foster Wallace’s story collection Oblivion. The essay was a put-on, a leg-pull, a sham, in ways that take some explaining for nonspecialists in recent American fiction. But no one publicly called attention to the con until last month.” In the meantime, some grad students mistook it for the real thing.
Twitter Is Not Inherently Bad For Classical Music
There are myriad right ways to listen to a concert, and reading tweets can be one of them. “Some people listen with their eyes closed, others follow a score (is that inherently less distracting than reading a Twitter screen? I sometimes feel I miss things about the performance when I focus on reading along in the printed music), others focus on the conductor. Some let their minds wander….”
Spring Green Eco-Theatre Links Stage World, Surroundings
American Players Theatre, in Spring Green, Wis., “is a conservative operation that has long tended to operate under a dictum akin to first, do no harm. This irritates those of us who’d like to see this gorgeous and highly proficient, but demonstrably risk-averse, arts organization grow its national reputation…. But it’s a we-pay-our-bills philosophy that has allowed APT to build one of the very few new theaters in America constructed in the teeth of this recession.”
Using Rap And Metal To Help Wounded Soldiers Heal
Classically trained pianist and composer Arthur Bloom isn’t engaging in “standard music therapy” in his project with injured veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Determined to provide them with “serious, one-on-one, customized training, ongoing collaboration, [and] professional mentors, … he persuaded donors to give him instruments, got Steve Jobs to donate computers, and set up what looks like a small recording studio in one of the residential houses at Walter Reed.”
Narratives Vs. Episodics — Not Much Of A Smackdown
“[E]pisodic fiction has been dealt a sorry hand of late. Our most popular critically acclaimed novels are pure narratives. Their straightforward storytelling style connects events together in one continuous thruline whose fundamental purpose is to reveal the Big Fated Meaning of life. In the war between Narratives and Episodics, the former are winning hands-down.”
Chicago Symphony’s Ravinia Jumbotrons – A Hit With The Crowds
For most Ravinia patrons, this rock-concert brand of intimacy — introduced this year — has been a welcome addition to Chicago’s storied music festival. Ravinia CEO and executive director Welz Kauffman states that 99 percent of the feedback he’s received on the giant screens has been in the form of “outrageous praise.”
Chicago Millennium Park Theatre Sues Architects Over Repairs
“The Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park has filed a complaint against Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge Architects, the firm that designed and supervised the theater’s construction. Early last year, emergency repairs began on the mostly underground theater to fix damage from water seeping into the external stairwells, offices and other non-public spaces.”
The New Infinity Of Classical Music
“For a century or so, the life of a home listener was simple: you had your disks, whether in the form of cylinders, 78s, LPs, or CDs, and, no matter how many of them piled up, there was a clear demarcation between the music that you had and the music that you didn’t. The Internet has removed that distinction. Near-infinity awaits on the other side of the magic rectangle.”
Nicholson Baker On What’s Wrong With His Kindle
It’s not only that the screen is a “four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon.” Nor is it merely the “grim and Calvinist” font, or that the text-to-speech feature bats less than a thousand. There’s also a lot missing from the library: “I spent an hour standing in front of some fiction bookcases, checking on titles. There is no Amazon Kindle version of ‘The Jewel in the Crown.’ There’s no Kindle of Jean Stafford, no Vladimir Nabokov, no ‘Flaubert’s Parrot,’ no ‘Remains of the Day’….”