Tag: 12.27.02

Broadway Perks Up

For much of 2002, Broadway seemed caught in a downdraft. But “for the fall and winter, Broadway ticket sales have been running 15% ahead of last year’s levels, says Jed Bernstein, president of the League of American Theatres & Producers. Sales could even surpass 2000’s record-setting figures. Thanksgiving week alone racked up $18.6 million, vs. $16 million for the same week in 2000. Now, with 33 shows on the boards, Broadway is wrapping up its holiday season, traditionally the strongest time of the year. What happened?”

Reconsidering Communism (Again)

It’s not like Communism wasn’t given a chance. But even though most of the major governments that followed the ideology have failed, Marx isn’t discredited. “Indeed, it is suggested, Marx was right about a good many things—about a lot of what is wrong with capitalism, for instance, about globalisation and international markets, about the business cycle, about the way economics shapes ideas. Marx was prescient; that word keeps coming up. By all means discard communism as practised in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (and China, North Korea, Cuba and in fact wherever it has been practised). But please don’t discard Marx.”

Dumbing Down Music On TV

Make classical music “relevant”? “Hip”? “Glamorous”? The new Classic FM TV packages classical music into three-minute MTV-style videos, but far from making it attractive, it succeeds in “creating bland ‘easy listening’ versions that are impossible for any serious musician to listen to.”

The Picture That Started It all

The world’s first photograph was taken in 1826. Is it a great picture? “It’s all too easy to think that an interesting picture is a picture of an interesting thing—this is the power of photojournalism, some snapshots, certain forms of portraiture, and so on. But the truth is trickier: The quality of a photograph lies not in its subject matter but in the irreducible entanglement of photographer, apparatus, and image.”

Year Of The Blues

The US Congress has declared 2003 the “Year of the Blues.” “If hip-hop is ‘the black CNN,’ as Chuck D. famously suggested, blues music was a running news bulletin from the earliest days of radio. The blues, as the Congress noted, have documented the Great Depression, ‘race relations, pop culture and the migration of the United States from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrialized nation’.”

Crusading For Classics

Harold Bloom has written another book crusading for literature’s days of yore. “The reason he sells books in their tens of thousands is that he has set himself against the tendency of universities to talk in relativist terms about literature, to promote cultural studies and to analyse books as part of a progressivist political project. Bloom loathes all this and in the past few years has done everything he can to reclaim the classics of literature for the general reader. This has involved a paradoxical restatement of the need for tradition and literary evaluation.”

Quotable – A Way Of Seeing The World

Why try to quote others? “Quotations are part of the fabric of conversation. We all repeat lines from our friends and family, passing on what Jane said to Tom, or retelling a joke we heard in a pub. Throwing Arthur Miller, or Nick Cave, into the mix is a way of including these people in our circle of intimacy, a way of paying homage to the works we love. Some argue that art works in a similar way, as an endless series of quotations and mis-quotations. Absorbed by a kind of cultural osmosis, they become the markers of our social and generational milieu.”

New York Kills Film Studio Plan

A proposed movie studio complex, to be built in New York’s Staten Island, has been been killed. “A year after then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani gave Aiello’s firm, Stapleton Studios, a permit to build on the old Staten Island Homeport, the deal has collapsed amid charges of incompetence and fraud. The city evicted the studio owners; the group refused to go and is suing.”