Tag: 01.16.05

Charlotte Proposes Arts Building Plan

Members of Charlotte’s city government propose spending $130 million on new arts facilities. “Supporters of the plan — which was unveiled at Monday’s City Council meeting — say it would mark a dramatic shift in public funding for the arts, with an emphasis on building venues and a drastic reduction for the various arts groups in subsidies for operating expenses such as utilities, janitorial services and minor maintenance.”

Promotion Wars – Where Are The Publishers?

Writers now spend an extraordinary part of their lives promoting their work. “Now, more than ever, the book-promotion machine is working against the interests of the writers it has been set up to promote. Now, as never before, the marketplace is devouring the hand, the arm and the head that feed it. Authors of all shapes and sizes have become either the dupes or accomplices of a publishing industry that is exploiting its writers as its unpaid representatives.”

The Pentagon Wants To Read Your Mind

The pentagon has given a scientist a “$5 million grant to work on her theory that by monitoring brainwaves she can detect whether someone is lying. She claims the system has an accuracy of between 94% and 100% and is an improvement on the existing polygraph tests, which rely on heart rate and blood pressure, respiratory rate and sweatiness.”

The Decency Crackdown: Year Two

For nearly a year, broadcasters have been wailing about the FCC’s harsh and occasionally confusing crackdown on what it views as indecent content, and many programmers are still not entirely sure of what type of content will or will not pass muster. On the other side of the screen, conservative “family” groups have been considerably emboldened by their successes in the past year, and are becoming more overt than ever in their attempts to make television safe for innocent eyes.

London’s Theatrical King Du Jour

Nicholas Hytner’s tenure at the head of the UK’s National Theatre has not been without difficulty, but at the moment, he is presiding over an institution widely thought to be at the top of its creative and popular game. “In the last financial year he made a small profit, even with a slash in ticket prices, instead of the $900,000 loss that was predicted. He has filled 90 percent of the 2,300 seats, many with first-timers (as credit cards receipts attest). And he has staged new, risky work and venerable classics – from “Jerry Springer – the Opera” to Euripides’ “Iphigenia at Aulis” to David Hare’s “Stuff Happens,” a docudrama about the Iraq war – while sometimes dazzling audiences and critics.”

Dorfman Dance, Act II

“With resources diminishing and costs rising, even established troupes are in a fierce struggle for survival, and only the most popular choreographers… are financially secure.” So when a once-celebrated choreographer finds himself at the wrong end of the fiscal stick, what options are left to him? For David Dorfman, the answer was to go back to where it all began – his alma mater, Connecticut College – and rediscover the simple magic of the form.

Put Down The Camera. Seriously. Now.

Thanks to the advent of digital video technology, it’s cheaper than ever to produce and shoot a film, and wannabes across the U.S. are taking their shot. But so few of these films will ever actually be seen by a paying audience that it often seems a terrible waste of talent and resources. “[Even] if you successfully navigate Hollywood’s gauntlet and your movie is made and released, it’s unlikely you’ll ever see real money from it. A studio movie costs on average $64 million to produce and $62 million to market, for a total average investment of $128 million per film… and, after the theaters take their share, only about 50 percent of the box-office gross revenue comes back to the studio.”

Confrontational Filmmaking: Not Just For Whackos Anymore

Michael Moore and Mel Gibson may be on opposite sides of the American socio-political divide, but both men made movies that transformed the Hollywood landscape in 2004. “Both generated the kinds of complicated discussions mainstream Hollywood normally tries to avoid… You could literally feel the audiences at these screenings connecting with these films… and the resulting theater-lobby conversations, while heated, were not nearly as simplistic or confrontational as the films’ attackers predicted.”

Is Pop Killing British Culture?

The managing director of the London Philharmonia is sounding the alarm about what he views as an unstoppable erosion of British high culture under the juggernaut of commercially-driven pop. “Thanks to a relentless diet of pop and dance music, television theme tunes and a growing cultural ignorance, most of his potential audience only hears classical music at the cinema. If it were not for foreign visitors and tourists, he claims, most classical concerts in Britain would be played to almost empty halls.”