The Seattle Symphony has had a recent run of deficits, putting it in a strong position in its just-concluded contract negotiations with musicians. “The symphony did not back away from its commitment in the 2001 contract to increase musicians’ weekly salaries 36 percent by 2006, which includes a 7 percent pay hike this year. To do so, the length of the season will drop back from 46 weeks to 45 weeks this year.”
Tag: 09.14.05
Lions Gate Tries To Buy DVD Producer
Canadian independent producer Lions Gate has made a bid to buy DVD producer Image Entertainment. “Lions Gate, which is based in British Columbia with offices in Santa Monica, California, announced plans last year to make strategic acquisitions. In May, it considered, but then dropped, an effort to bid for British production company HIT Entertainment. Image said Lions Gate was interested in the depth of its library of programs and films and growing music business.”
From Delivering Ketchup To Singing Opera
Exotic Puerto Rican soprano Scheherazade Pesante is making her London debut. “Now in her mid-thirties, Pesante approached opera back to front. Last year, she sang Carmen for the semi-professional AAC opera. She is about to start her fourth year of vocal studies at the Guildhall School of Music (conveniently situated next door to her flat), and harbours a yearning to sing Violetta in La Traviata. Before this, however, she spent a couple of riotous decades in cabaret and fringe theatre in New York, interspersed with bouts as a female wrestler, an artist’s model and a part-time truck driver delivering Heinz ketchup.”
Is The Wonderfully Workable Web Under Attack?
Legal doctrines “being aggressively pushed by corporations and law enforcement officials” are attempting to lock up content and programs on the internet. “The better world is one in which we don’t need to seek permission or risk punishment to do cool stuff that makes the world a better place. In the early days of the internet, a lot of people felt that we’d found that better world. Thanks to the internet’s open protocols, many of the most useful innovations, from the web to instant messaging to internet telephony, emerged without developers needing anyone’s permission to run their cool new code.”
Oops – Software Company Approriates Scottish Arts Council Logo
makes of a leading desktop publishing program – “Quark” – proudly unveiled their new logo, a stylized “Q” last weekend. But almost immediately critics pointed out that “the desktop publishing company’s new-look green ‘Q’ logo is visually almost identical with the Scottish Arts Council’s (SAC) long-used blue ‘A’ logo. Such similarities were quickly noted by users in multiple design-focused message boards, but it’s an honest mistake, claimed Quark.”
Couldn’t We Use An Ode To Cricket?
England has won the cricket championship. But where is the cricket literature? “I cannot think of any fictional depiction of cricket – and, even as I write this sentence, I expect to be contradicted – that goes any way towards capturing the heroism, the beauty, the sheer glory that cricket is capable of conjuring in a series like the one we have just witnessed. English cricket writing is too busy observing the social niceties and oddities of the game at a local level – where it is heavenly but not always inspiring – to raise its eyes to higher things. In this it is entirely different from American literature’s treatment of baseball.”
Stars Pay Off For West End Theatre
Hiring Broadway stars for London’s West End seems to be a strategy that works big-time at the box office, says online ticket retailer latsminute.com. “Ticket purchases on the site have tripled in the last year, it said. ‘Going to the theatre has become the in thing to do this year, according to our sales figures’.”
Van Gogh Films To Be Remade
Three of murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s films will be remade. “Dutch and US co-producers will re-make 06, Blind Date and Interview in early 2006, Screen International said. In July radical Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri was sentenced to life in prison for shooting and stabbing van Gogh.”
Bloomsbury Trolls For US Aquisition
English publisher Bloomsbury wants to buy its way into the US market, and its fortune built on Harry Potter should make it happen. “The publisher will have an estimated cash pile of £50m by the end of the year as it reaps the benefit of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in the teenage wizard saga. A US children’s publisher with a weighty back catalogue is a priority target but the group admitted yesterday that many potential acquisitions were demanding too high a price.”
When Architects Copy
“How important should artistic authorship be in the world of architecture? For most of the last 500 years, imitation was the sincerest form of architectural flattery. The pattern was established during the Renaissance, whose architects were trying to re-create the buildings of ancient Rome. The fact that most of these buildings lay in ruins meant that designers had to do a lot of creative reconstruction, but that didn’t alter the principle of learning from—and copying—the past. Invention was necessary, but it was not the most important factor.”