Yorkshire-born guitarist Derek Bailey, who “has died aged 75 of complications from motor neurone disease, was a guru without self-importance, a teacher without a rulebook, a guitar-hero without hot licks and a one-man counterculture without ever believing he knew all the answers – or maybe any at all. With his passing, the world has lost an inimitable musician and an implacable enemy of commercialised art.”
Tag: 12.29.05
When American Kid TV Meets China
“While every American industry that comes here faces its own obstacles, the bar that exporters of children’s television programming must vault is particularly high: a traditional culture of respect for parents and authority reinforced by decades of Communist discipline and the ruthless competitiveness of an educational system that favors rigor over imagination. Still, Viacom, which dominates youth-oriented programming in the United States and other parts of the world with its MTV and Nickelodeon networks, is aggressively courting Chinese youngsters, hoping to introduce them to its brand of playfully antiauthoritarian programming.”
A Great Year For Broadway Theatre
The League of American Theaters and Producers reports that paid attendance on Broadway this year ‘was the highest since 1985 – just shy of 12 million people, an increase of almost 6 percent from last year. And those theatergoers paid an average of $68.86 a ticket, about $2.75 more than last year. Gross sales reached $825 million for Broadway’s 39 theaters, a jump of more than 10 percent from 2004. The total number of performances, another indicator of the industry’s health, increased by about 4 percent, and attendance per performance was up, too, by about 1.5 percent.”
Pamuk’s Turkish Legal Troubles Continue
Orhan Pamuk is Turkey’s most famous writer. Turkish authorities now say he will “not face charges over saying in an interview with a German newspaper that Turkey’s military was sometimes a threat to democracy. “He is already on trial under Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code for remarks made to a Swiss newspaper earlier this year about the massacre of Armenians and Kurds. Article 301 makes it an offence to insult the ‘Turkish identity’ or state institutions, including the armed forces.”
The REALLY Small Screen
“The next 12 months looks set to be the year mobile TV takes off. While the buzz around it is similar to the hype for 3G services, there is much greater optimism that TV will live up to its promise.” Some expect “about 50 million users of mobile TV by 2009, generating an estimated £3.5bn in revenue. Content that feeds off existing shows or offer extra behind-the-scene video is likely to be widely available initially but eventually there will be bespoke made-for-mobile shows.”
Why Hollywood Doesn’t Cast Women Over 40
There are few if any parts for them, and that’s always been how the industry works. “It worked out that by the 1930s a woman could be a star into her mid 30s or even her mid-40s. As we progressed past World War II and up to the present time it got to be a pretty standard rule of thumb that once a movie actress got to be over 40 then supposedly, psychologically, America’s young kids didn’t want to see her playing leading roles so they wrote fewer parts for them.”
Music Biz Moving Online
Sales of CDs dropped seven percent in 2005, but downloads more than doubled. “Sales stood at 602.2 million during the year, down from 650.8 million in 2004, report analysts Nielsen Soundscan. Downloaded music reached 332.7 million for 2005, an increase of 148% on the previous year. More than 95% of music is sold in CD format, with Mariah Carey and 50 Cent proving the year’s biggest sellers.”
The Culture Of Texting
“About 7.3 billion text messages are sent within the United States every month, up from 2.9 billion a month a year ago. Compared with an ink-and-paper letter, messages may seem disposable. The relative inconvenience of typing out words using a numeric keypad — the letter “c,” for example, requires three presses of the “2” button — and the brevity of the message may seem a hostile environment for heartfelt discussion. But the discipline of having to distill thoughts into short bulletins, then waiting to receive the response, allows users to pour more meaning into the writing, some text-message users say.”
Dancing In A War Zone
The Baghdad suburb of Mansour is known mostly these days for the near-constant sound of bombs, set off by insurgents targeting the new Iraqi army, and for the cries of those whose loved ones are caught in the crossfire. But Mansour is also home to Iraq’s one and only Music and Ballet School, where a dedicated staff of teachers and professionals works to fill the lives of Iraqi children with a love of dance. In post-Saddam Iraq, anti-Western sentiment runs strong, and many at the school now keep their Western-derived professions secret from all but those closest to them. But asked how many Shiites and how many Sunnis make up the student body, the school’s director has one firm answer: “We don’t know. We have students.”
Dali’s Secretary & Exploiter Dies
“The former personal secretary of Salvador Dali, who was embroiled in scandals involving the surrealist Spanish painter’s works, has died aged 86… During the time he worked as the painter’s confidant, [John Peter] Moore amassed an important collection of works that became the subject of controversy after the artist’s death in January 1989. In October 2004 a court in Figueras, Dali’s birthplace, convicted Moore and [his wife] of violating intellectual property rights by changing the title of a Dali work displayed in their art centre… In November 2004 a Barcelona court ruled that Moore suffered from senile dementia and was incapable of standing trial on charges of falsifying and selling unauthorised reproductions of Dali’s works.”