There are fantasy baseball camps, fantasy auto-racing camps, even fantasy Broadway camps. Now there’s fantasy rock star camp. “Through Weekend Warriors, retailers around the country seek out and connect wannabe rock musicians in their area, provide them with gear and rehearsal space, and eventually help them put on a live performance at a local venue. The five-week program costs $95 per person and attracts as many as a hundred musicians a year. ‘What we give them is the equivalent of a catered experience of being in a band’.”
Tag: 08.17.03
Booker: A Short List Getting Longer
What’s the big deal about a longlist for the Booker Prize? Isn’t it the shortlist that really matters? “Once upon a time, it was the announcement of the short list that could be relied upon to encourage literary commentators to break cover. Not any more. Faced with stiff competition, and some serious headline-hogging, from Orange and Whitbread, Britain’s premier literary prize now resorts to the black arts of spin, announcing its long list a full two months before the ultimate showdown in the Guildhall. Betting on such a list is as much of a mug’s game as taking a punt on a National Hunt steeplechase.”
Chopin As Jazz
A Chopin festival in Warsaw experiments with connections between the great Polish composer and jazz. “Because Polish musicians live and breathe Chopin’s music practically from the moment they first place their fingers on a piano or a fiddle, jazz artists such as violinist Maciej Strzelczyk and pianist Filip Wojciechowski were well equipped to radically reconceive themes from Chopin’s preludes, waltzes and etudes. To these artists, reworking a motif from a classic Chopin piano piece is akin to an American player riffing on the chord changes of George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” — this indigenous music courses through their veins.”
Librarian To The Rescue
An “action figure” company has come out with its latest doll – an action figure librarian based on Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl. “The company, which has produced a successful series of historical action figures that include Jesus, Moses and Benjamin Franklin, jumped at the idea. Nancy Pearl became the second installment in their newest line of action figures based on everyday people in everyday jobs.”
Is Radio Drama Making A Comeback?
“For its passionate fans, radio drama is a radical performance mode, a near-telepathic transfer of audio cues from the speaker to the listener’s brain, intensely visual because the hearer supplies the images and completely different from the more communal experience of movie or television viewing.”
Playing On DVD
Movies of plays have not always conveyed a satisfactory experience of the play. DVD’s offer more. “In the last few years, several companies have begun issuing play collections on DVD, often with name directors and stellar casts. What distinguishes these collections is that, unlike a stereotypical Hollywood adaptation, there is as much respect for the original work as there is for the film’s end result.”
DVD’s Rule
“For the movie industry, the DVD has become so important that the tail now appears to be wagging the dog. The studios — and the rest of us — have realized that nothing they put on screen will ever go away again. As a result, features that were created to appeal to connoisseurs, and that were once available only on large, unwieldy and expensive laser discs, are now routinely enjoyed by mass-market film fans. The esoterica of film culture, formerly consumed by a moneyed geek elite, is now aimed directly at — and snapped up by — the broader public.”
Tracey Emin Sues Critic
Tracey Emin is suing critic Hensher. “The feud began in the Independent when Hensher wrote a damning critique of Emin, claiming she was too stupid to be a good conceptual artist. ‘Is it possible to be a good conceptual artist and also very stupid?’ he asked. He doubted it. Emin, he wrote, was a half-witted dullard with no inquiring intelligence. She was, he added, too thick to explore the few interesting concepts she had hit on by chance, and concluded: ‘There’s no hope for Tracey Emin. She’s just no good’.”