“After an all-male Swan Lake and the high-camp kitsch of his Nutcracker!, the choreographer Matthew Bourne is to complete his Tchaikovsky trilogy with a new version of one of the grandest ballets of them all – a modern-day Sleeping Beauty.”
Tag: 10.26.11
James Wolcott On Being A Critic
“Being a critic isn’t anyone’s childhood dream, an occupation that schools set out a booth for on Career Day, a religious calling that glimmers in the goldenrod. It’s impossible to imagine George Sanders’s Addison DeWitt from All About Eve as anything other than a fully formed adult, issued from a printing press.”
Why Taxpayers Get Screwed When Every State And Province Fights To Lure Movie Shoots
“[Tax credits are] bad economics, they don’t make a film better (at times I think they actually make them worse, since trying to make one location look like another is never as impressive as just going to the place the movie is set), and they’re a misuse of public funds, especially during this seemingly unending recession.”
The Effect Effect: Rendering Cognitive Phenomena Into Catchphrases And Spreading Them Around
Confirmation bias. The framing effect. The sunk-cost fallacy. “Let’s call it the effect effect: Reduce whatever you’re talking about to a single, italicized phrase, so much the better for tapping into a network of TED talks and Radiolab broadcasts, and then repeat, repeat, repeat.”
Sex, Suicide, And Conspiracies: How To Make Hit Films About Writers
“Unlike with biopics about athletes, musicians, and artist, there’s no visual appeal to a writer’s craft. So you tend to end up with embellishments, falsifications, and gimmicks … The struggle to pen a classic novel may play a role in these films, but often it’s secondary to the role played by juicy romantic plot lines. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
Describing The Economy In Haiku
The Kauffmann Foundation added a little challenge to its last quarterly survey of economics bloggers: capture the current state of the economy in a haiku. The Economist offers us the results.
Performance Artist Gives Birth In Gallery (This Is Not A Parody)
“Marni Kotak, an artist whose plans to give birth in a New York gallery as an act of performance art provoked criticism and concern, delivered a healthy baby boy Tuesday … before an audience in a home birthing center she constructed at the Microscope Gallery.”
The Economy Behind The Economy (Or Is That Beneath?)
“More than half of all employed people worldwide work off the books. And that number is expected to climb over the next decade.”
New Street Parking Fees Threaten London’s West End
“It will be the first time the council has charged for parking after 6.30pm or on Sundays, with London theatres claiming it could put audiences off coming to the theatre and cost them as much as £70 million in ticket sales annually.”
A Fresh Supply Of Encores (Hilary Hahn’s Got ‘Em)
Violinist Hilary Hahn has commissioned them. Twenty-seven of them. “I remember thinking that I didn’t want to do what so many people had already done. And then I thought, there haven’t been any new encores written lately, so that might be a good idea.”