Broadway’s new season is about to open. “Unlike in previous years, there’s no potential blockbuster in the wings, no “Hairspray,” “Wicked” or “The Producers” that has the town buzzing with anticipation and hope. One could say that so far it appears it may be a rather ho-hum season, but it’s still early, and over the next few months some shows will drop off, some will be deferred and, more important, others will emerge and be added to the menu.”
Tag: 08.22.04
UK Media Discovers Ethnic Consumers
UK TV and radio stations have discovered that non-white consumers have money. “A few years ago, businesses were obsessed with the pink pound and grey pound, launching charm offensives at gay and older consumers. Now, they’ve turned their attention to ethnic minorities and the brown pound, worth £32 billion according to a recent advertising industry report. The airwaves have changed as well. At last, it seems, black consumers are being taken seriously.”
The Cure For The Over-Published World
A 100,000 new books published in a year? 120,000? 175,000? Yikes – who can keep up? And yet, gentle reader, who wants to keep up? How many books can you read in a year? How many books are actually worth reading in a year? Fear not, Chickens Little, your innate taste will save you!
The Case Of The Missing Manuscript
Author Louis De Bernières, author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, has lost 50 pages of his next book by leaving them on a laptop computer and going to the Edinburgh festival.
Of Theatre, Film, And Reality
Many people find film easier to relate to than theatre. Theatre, for many, is too unrealistic, too tied up in its unnatural conventions. But what about a film that takes theatre at its core?
Underground Railway Center Rises
The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center opens in Cincinnati this week. Blair Kamin reports that the building is a mixed success. “The architecture of the Freedom Center rises and falls to the extent it exploits and expresses this tension. The museum is, in some respects, powerful and poetic, its undulating travertine walls symbolizing the indirect, often-torturous routes — through mountains and forests, and over rivers — that slaves took to freedom. The trouble is, this sort of poetry doesn’t occur with enough consistency, especially inside, to make the museum the powerhouse combination of intellect and emotion, the visual and the visceral, it might have been.”
Trane’s Modern Classic (40 Years Later)
John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” is 40 years old. “Revered wherever jazz is spoken, recorded (at least in part) by no less than Wynton Marsalis and Carlos Santana with John McLaughlin, praised by critics, dissected by scholars, rehearsed by young tenor saxophonists who dream of greatness, the indelible recording long since has earned a sacred place in American culture. So much, in fact, that musicians often hesitate when asked to perform this music publicly, for fear of presuming to step into the shadow of a jazz deity who addressed life and afterlife, man and God, in an oft-shattering recording.”
The Chicago Symphony’s Difficult Contract
The Chicago Symphony and its musicians have taken a little time off from their contract talks. “Contract negotiations between CSO musicians and management are rarely easy, and they typically go down to the wire, but these talks could be among the toughest in recent memory. Like many American orchestras, the CSO has been running deficits and watching the size of its audiences stagnate if not shrink. CSO management is pushing to save money; CSO musicians are pushing to avoid losing too much ground.”
The Persistent Journal (As A Form)
Small literary journals are a precarious enterprise. “Circulating only in the low thousands (most of them), subsisting more on donations and patronage than subscription income, kept viable largely through low-paid or even unremunerated labor by devoted staffers, these quarterly or biannual compendia of fiction, poetry, essays, and art are showcases of idealism begotten upon unlikelihood. Yet for all this, in spite of the myriad ills that under-funded ventures are heir to, in spite of the fact that our info-environment is now so paced to the fleeting quick fix, the double-barreled snort of gloss, these journals do survive. Better, they persist.”
What The Well-Tuned Colonel Should Read
The US military has lists of books it recommends to troops. In 2000 Army Chief of Staff Shinseki detailed his list. These are the books that the chief of staff thinks his colonels and generals should be reading. Now an update by the current Chief, and the changes are interesting. “The Army’s reading list is actually a collection of four sublists, each designed for personnel at different stages in their career.”