“The BBC has been criticised for spending millions of pounds of licence fee payer’s money on art works for its new flagship building including £25,000 on a remote controlled helicopter to fly overhead” and photograph the site.
Tag: 01.03.10
For Lovers Of Opera Singing, It’s A Good Time To Be Alive
“It’s a golden age of deep repertoire exploration and high-velocity coloratura – singers who put out more notes per second than nearly anybody in recorded memory. … Making matters more fun: Fans don’t have to invent artistic rivalries. The singers are doing that themselves.”
P.D. James Politely Eviscerates BBC Honcho On The Air
“[T]he 89-year-old crime writer’s forensic questions about his executives’ pay packets reduced [BBC director-general Mark Thompson] to a ‘stuttering wreck’, as one observer put it. … The writer may be elderly but her mind is, by one account, ‘as sharp as a cleaver’.”
What Differentiates Publishers From E-Book Distributors
“In this increasingly virtual age of open access and universal availability, it’s important for readers to keep in mind what it is that a publisher does for an author. A publisher … selects, nurtures, positions and promotes the writer’s work. An e-book distributor is not a publisher, but rather a purveyor of work that has already been created.”
National Film Critics Pick Hurt Locker As Top 2009 Film
The National Society of Film Critics on Sunday selected “The Hurt Locker,” a film about an elite Army bomb squad unit that works in Iraq to defuse improvised explosives while under the threat of insurgents, as the best picture of 2009.
Study: Music With Positive Messages Positively Affects Teens
“After years of studies purporting to show the harmful effects of young people listening to songs with violent or misogynistic themes, a psychologist has concluded that music containing a positive message has a beneficial impact on listeners.”
Canada Refuses To Confiscate Dead Sea Scrolls
“The Canadian government says it will not act upon a request by the Jordanian government that it seize the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea scrolls, now on their last day of display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.”
Ragtime’s Closing Says Something About The Current Broadway
“You eventually come to a truth about the nature of what Broadway has become: a venue not merely for solid nights of theater, but one-of-a-kind entertainment “events” — some more deserving of that distinction than others. In that sense, “Ragtime” was behind the times. New York did not deem it to be an event.”
Avatar Breaks Billion-Dollar Box Office Mark
“Fueled by $202 million in worldwide ticket sales during the New Year holiday weekend, the James Cameron sci-fi epic has earned $1.02 billion just 18 days after opening.”
Will E-Books Save Publishing?
“E-books could open up a worldwide market for small press publishers and make distribution problems a thing of the past. Possibly I’m just feeling hopeful with the coming of a new year but, having initially been a skeptic, I think e-books may well be just the thing the failing publishing industry needs.”