“After 36 years of operations and a recent move to a new, high-tech space at Seattle University, Empty Space could not raise the funds it needed to continue the 2006 season. The three-production 2007 season, announced earlier this month, also will be scrapped.”
Tag: 10.28.06
If You Have To Explain The Joke…
Comedy is big business these days, but the art of making people laugh remains as mysterious as ever, particularly for those of us who don’t know how to do it. “Irony and detachment are not enough. Joke writing and performing is a craft, and while an all-encompassing theory of humour may elude us, it is possible to identify some of the basics in the building of a successful joke.”
When Oscar Buzz Becomes A Cutthroat Brawl
Has Hollywood suddenly begun churning out too many high quality movies for its own good? “All these quality adult-oriented movies can only mean one thing: Oscar fever. The industry’s obsession with the Academy Awards, which began as a symbol of achievement and are now a high-powered marketing tool, has transformed the end of the year into the Oscar Follies, offering a legitimate batch of award contenders surrounded by a scrum of hapless pretenders being released at year’s end only because of studio delusions, blind adherence to conventional wisdom and arm-twisting by narcissistic stars and filmmakers. The result is often a bloodbath.”
The Continuing Relevance Of Shostakovich
Mozart has gotten most of the attention, but this year is Shostakovich’s centenary as well, and John Terauds makes the case that the latter is far more relevant to today’s musical experience than the former. “Mozart conjures up powdered wigs, salons and silk-stockinged aristocrats. Shostakovich evokes mass media and tyranny, peace protests and global war, science and enslavement… This music can chill to the bone and tug at our heartstrings at the same time. It is tonal and rhythmic, bearing familiar sounds supported on a masterful architecture of harmony, dissonance and counterpoint — like the music of Bach.”
Dispute Arises Over (Possibly) Historic Novel
“The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, is believed by some scholars to be the first novel ever published by an African-American woman,” and this month, it will be reissued for the first time since its initial printing in 1865. “But the republication has stirred a dispute between its editors… and the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” who believes that he discovered a published novel by an African-American woman six years older than Slave Bride.
“Entertainment Tonight” Doesn’t Want You To Read This Blurb
Hollywood has a favorite promotional angle for controversial films: it involves giving as much airtime as possible to the people who don’t want you to see them, thus creating a sense of dangerousness around what are frequently relatively innocuous movies. But does the ploy actually convince anyone to buy a ticket? “In fact, veteran movie marketers say that while entertainment journalists keep falling for the ploy, audiences have long since wised up to it.”
Looking For That Old Fear & Loathing
Ralph Steadman’s name will probably always be irrevocably tied to that of his fellow counter-culture anti-hero, Hunter S. Thompson. “But where indeed is Steadman these days, that co-creator of early 1970s drug- and booze-drenched gonzo journalism as the artist who sketched Watergate-Middle America grotesqueries to accompany Thompson’s words, and who decades later helped to shoot Thompson’s ashes out of a 150-foot cannon? Where’s Steadman when we need his satire the most? Comfortably at home in England, thank you.”
Meeting Alice Again For The First Time
Author Alice Munro is beloved by countless readers, but has always maintained an iron barrier between her private life and the invasive culture of literary celebrity. But her latest collection of stories is “as close as Munro has come to turning her family’s life into stories,” and she seems slowly but surely to be letting the world into her life.
And The Last…?
Alice Munro has declared that her new collection of short stories will be her last, saying that, at age 75, she simply has nothing more to say…
Could Detroit Land Davis?
The Detroit Symphony has been searching for a new music director for a couple of years now, with no visible frontrunner emerging. But could Andrew Davis, who will shortly leave a leadership post with the Pittsburgh Symphony, be the DSO’s knight in shining armor? “Not that the DSO should act rashly. But 16 minutes into this concert, after a perfectly exquisite, poised, witty, not to say airborne turn through Haydn’s little Symphony No. 22 in E-flat, I would have been pushing a contract into Davis’ hands and filling his ear with honeyed promises.”