“Music is just, well, too long. It takes too much time. And that time has to be focused and continuous. You can walk by a hundred paintings as fast as the crowds allow you to. You can read a book anywhere you want, put it down whenever you want, and pick it up again without losing the thread.”
Tag: 01.09.07
Mel Gibson Movie Breaks UK Record
Apocalypto had the biggest all-time opening weekend. “The film, spoken in the Mayan dialect and estimated to have cost £20m, has taken £1.3m since its release last Friday. The film, which has received the kind of attention directors of other foreign language films can only dream of, beat the previous record holder, Hero, which took £1.05m in 2004 during its opening weekend.”
Be Safe – Fingerprint Your Artifacts
“Working on the principle that every object emits a distinct vibration, each piece of art or cultural artifact is fitted with a network of sensors, then tapped with a small rubber hammer. Recorded vibrations form a unique sonic fingerprint capable of distinguishing even works made in pairs or series. The process is noninvasive, takes just a few hours and can be used on stone, wood and ceramics.”
Reality Show Greases Ticket Sales
A “reality” TV show to choose leads for a Broadway revival of “Grease” has been a rocket for ticket sales. In just two days of sales, the show has sold $1.3 miilion in advance sale.
The NYT Reporter As Playwright
Bernard Weinraub covered Hollywood for the New York Times for years. Now in retirement, he’s written a play. And it’s being produced Off-Broadway. “Weinraub told me he’d been thinking about this play and its subject matter ‘for a long, long time’ — since the early 1980s, when he saw a PBS documentary by Laurence Jarvik called Who Shall Live And Who Shall Die about how the U.S. responded, or failed to respond, to the Holocaust.”
High School In Song (It’s A Hit!)
“Disney’s High School Musical–originally a fairly modest cable movie–has become a phenomenon, moving DVDs by the truckload, as though they were a cure for adolescence itself. Children’s Theatre Company landed the rights to produce this world premiere adaptation for the stage, and for their trouble they have already sold out the entire run.”
The Night The Bell Tolled For West End ‘Producers’
“Last Saturday saw the 920th and final performance of The Producers in London’s West End. We know all about first nights at the theatre, because they naturally get all the attention – the all-important early reviews, the news of the breakthrough performance, the will-it-won’t-it-float moment – but what are last nights like?”
Still Anarchic, ‘Les Demoiselles’ Turns 100
Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is a century old. “It’s not just 100 years in the life of a painting, but 100 years of modernism. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is the rift, the break that divides past and future. Culturally, the 20th century began in 1907. Consider the dates of other works of high modernism. In music, Schoenberg’s Erwartung was composed in 1909 and Stravinsky began The Rite of Spring in 1910. James Joyce didn’t get started on Ulysses until 1914, by which time Picasso was into the final stages of cubism.”
An Unexpected $1 Million For Baltimore Shakespeare
“At a time when the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival was feeling the pinch of rising costs, the small, 13-year-old professional theater received a surprise, anonymous $1 million gift to create an endowment fund. … The festival was considering producing only two shows,” rather than its usual four per year, “when the $1 million gift came in. Instead, the theater, which has a $600,000 budget, now has a firm financial base.”
Letting a 5,000-Year-Old (Restored) Ruin Look Its Age
“The last and largest of [ancient Egypt’s] cult centers — the only major one still standing in clearly recognizable form — was erected for King Khasekhemwy, who ruled in the second dynasty around 2780 B.C… Now, in an ambitious effort to preserve this ruin, archaeologists, engineers and teams of artisans and laborers are shoring up the walls and gates of Shunet el-Zebib, ravaged by time and the elements and in danger of imminent collapse.”