“Cantonese, a sharp, cackling dialect full of slang and exaggerated expressions, was never the dominant language of China. But it came to dominate the Chinatowns of North America because the first immigrants came from the Cantonese-speaking southern province of Guangdong, where China first opened its ports to foreigners centuries ago. But over the last three decades, waves of Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants have diluted the influence of both the Cantonese language and the pioneering Cantonese families who ran Chinatowns for years.”
Tag: 01.03.06
Seattle Museum Closes For Construction
This week the Seattle Art Museum closes its main building for 16 months to construct an expansion. “Downtown, the museum will have 300,000 square feet, tripling the exhibition space and providing a free-admission, wrap-around public corridor full of art and art events. Besides that, there’s plenty of room for further expansion. The building is 16 stories high, and initially the museum will occupy only the bottom four floors and rent out the rest to Washington Mutual. When SAM needs more room, it can hand the bank its walking papers for eight more floors. (The top four belong to the bank.)”
Who Will Lead Dallas?
The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s music director search is in full swing, and Scott Cantrell believes he has a handle on who might be a front-runner and who definitely isn’t: “Philippe Jordan, a Swiss-born 31-year-old with movie-star good looks, made his Dallas debut with richly expressive performances of Brahms and Strauss… having his mug on billboards wouldn’t hurt ticket sales. Claus Peter Flor, the DSO’s principal guest conductor since 1999, keeps molding one stunning performance after another… Yan Pascal Tortelier got finely finished playing from the orchestra, in spite of a strange baton technique.” And the up-and-coming Andrei Boreyko is making his Dallas debut later this year.
BBC Opens Archives Online
The BBC is making thousands of historic video clips available on the web. “The scheme allows people within the UK to watch, download, edit and mix the clips and programming for non-commercial programming. The release of these reports, offered as The Open News Archive, means the BBC has now doubled the number of programme extracts it originally made available through an initial trial with Radio 1 Interactive.”
Center For Arts And Culture Closes
The center had an 11-year run. “The continuously declining availability of general operating support in the current funding climate is a common plight and growing threat to the long-term sustainability of the arts and the nonprofit sector at large. Unfortunately, the Center has proven not to be immune to it this year.”
Pumped On Swan Lake
Acrobat shows in China have been on the decline. By contrast, “Swan Lake” is hugely popular there. Now an acrobatic troupe has produced a version of the ballet classic, and it’s a hit. “Surprisingly, its acrobatic version of “Swan Lake” has taken China by storm, filling houses in more than half a dozen cities, including more than 30 sold-out performances at the Shanghai Grand Theater, where it premiered last March.”
Ears In The Seats
“We think of concerts as fixed entities. In our age of mechanical reproduction, live performance has become – like a book, a movie, a painting – an object that can be recorded, examined and stamped with approval (or disapproval). So we tend to think that everyone who attends the same performance is hearing the same thing. But that’s not true, and not only because of vagaries of taste or hearing. It makes a big difference where you sit.”
Lost Everywhere
“This season, “Lost” is the fourth-ranked show in total viewers and the all-important 18- to 49-year-old demographic. But “Lost” has become something more, a model for a new media age, one that has far-reaching financial implications for artists and producers as new technology almost demands that they produce original content for Internet sites and blogs, DVDs, podcasts and books.”
The End Of Wild-West File-Sharing
“File-sharing barons are facing their own day of reckoning after a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision last summer. Over the last four months, several Napster heirs have shut down and others are contemplating what they once couldn’t abide — doing business by the entertainment industry’s rules to survive.”
What Will You Pay For Media?
“The best things in life — TV, radio, newspapers — used to be free, or pretty darned close to free. And now they’re not. So the media question for 2006 is: What are you going to pay for, and why?”