“Two giants of dance died last year: Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham. Right now audiences aren’t being deprived of seeing why their names are written permanently in lights in dance history … but after 2011 they may be. Cunningham’s company will close, while Bausch’s will be in its last of an uncertain three-year grace period.”
Tag: 08.09.10
NYC’s Drawing Center Abandons Plans to Move
“After years of looking for a new downtown home, the Drawing Center has decided to stay put in its SoHo neighborhood. ‘The economy made us re-evaluate what scale of project we want,’ said [director] Brett Littman.”
Jack Parnell, 87, The Muppets’ Bandleader
“[He] was a drummer, a popular bandleader in the 1950s, and went onto become musical director at Associated Television. In this capacity he had musical responsibility for the whole of ATV’s output, from Sunday Night At The London Palladium to The Muppet Show.“
Made-for-Web Video Begins a Comeback
“After a protracted drought, money is trickling back into the professional Web video industry. So-called branded entertainment deals like the one by Ikea are becoming more common, helping to nourish new programming. And venture capital firms are also paying new attention to the industry.”
The Danger in Thinking About Kindness to Robots
Jaron Lanier: “What bothers me most about this trend, however, is that by allowing artificial intelligence to reshape our concept of personhood, we are leaving ourselves open to the flipside: we think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people.”
Rolando Villazon Gives Up Concert After Seven Minutes (Sorry, No Refunds)
“Those with front row seats for Ricardo Villazón’s concert paid 178 [Danish] kroner per minute. Fans … paid between 500 and 1,250 kroner [$88 to $221 US] to hear the renowned Mexican tenor sing at Tivoli Gardens last night. Villazón did sing – three short songs and none of them well.”
Kazakh Filmmaker Fights Back Against Borat
“In a belated answer to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America To Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan, a Kazakh filmmaker announced plans for an unofficial sequel that will present a more positive view of the Central Asian nation.”
Pondering The Donald Rosenberg Music Critic Verdict
Of course the orchestra didn’t like Don Rosenberg’s coverage. Of course it talked to the paper about it. But it’s an unusually public exposure of hypocrisy to follow a public assertion of “we had nothing to do with this” with “it was our right to defend ourselves.”
The New Neuro-Advertising – Getting Inside People’s Brains
The great hope of neuromarketing is to extract this hidden information directly from people’s brains. “We’re not asking questions at all – we’re recording responses at a deep subconscious level.”
What Is To Become Of The Record Labels?
“Now that the outsized profits of the CD era have disappeared, the music business is rapidly retrenching. With a limited amount of money to make–a sum dwarfed by movies, video games, and sporting events–many bands may figure out that major labels’ publicity budgets are an unsustainable luxury.”