Sundance certainly still has the right to call itself an independent film festival, and it can’t be denied that the Park City hoedown remains a mecca for up-and-coming filmmakers. But this year, the festival also dug deep to reach new heights of comparatively safe, traditional Hollywood excess. “Welcome to Sundance, where a studio’s ode to a porno auteur’s independent vision earns thunderous applause at a world premiere stuffed with industry execs and billed in the festival program as an example of ‘bravery and courage.’ (Not just bravery, mind you, but bravery and courage.)”
Tag: 02.02.05
Fighting Online Diploma Mills
A new online database launched this week by the U.S. Department of Education is aiming to make it easier for prospective students seeking online or correspondence degrees to distinguish between accredited online schools and deceptive diploma mills which essentially trade worthless degrees for cash. “The white-list database could be a useful tool for would-be students and prospective employers who do not know how to distinguish between Hamilton University, a diploma mill in Wyoming, and Hamilton College, a small, distinguished and legitimately accredited liberal arts school in New York.”
So Good, Even The Enemy Uses It
iPods are wildly popular in the little town of Redmond, Washington. So what, you say? They’re popular everywhere, you say? Yeah, well, Redmond just happens to be home to the Microsoft Corporation, and those people wandering the streets with the telltale Apple-produced white earphones trailing from their ears are all Microsoft employees. And don’t think that seeing their closest competitors product dangling from the heads of their own people doesn’t have Microsoft’s notoriously competitive management all in a tizzy.
National Gallery Goes Digital
“Interactive displays have been a part of museum and galleries for about two decades but have rarely been successful at augmenting the whole visiting experience… [London’s] National Gallery hopes it can change all that with its new service ArtStart. Visitors can search the entire 2,300-strong collection of the gallery and view pictures that have been digitised on a 100 megapixel camera. The captured images are not displayed in their full glory – that would take up too much storage space – but visitors can zoom in on any section of any painting.”
Classical Recording Dead? Don’t Tell Naxos.
At a time when many big record labels are shedding their classical divisions and many smaller niche labels are going dark altogether, Naxos is an unusual and telling success story. “Ten years ago, some people were more than a little sniffy about the Naxos phenomenon… [but] these days, Naxos is picking up awards, with two mentions in the New York Times last year for adventurous recordings of William Bolcom and Peter Maxwell Davies. The British Gramophone and Penguin Guide magazines regularly hand out praise.” The label has released some 3,000 albums since its inception in 1987, and has made nearly its entire catalogue available online.
Was This Actually In Doubt?
The Last Night of the BBC Proms is not exactly what most classical musicians would consider high art – in fact, it’s mainly a bunch of flag-waving and patriotic folk songs with a raucous crowd singing along – but it couldn’t be much more popular, and so this week, shortly after being appointed the new chief conductor of the BBC Symphony, Jiri Belohlavek went through the usual motion of dashing the faint hopes of critics across the UK and assuring the public that Last Night would continue to be just as it has always been.
Even Duplicate News Rates Higher Than Classical?
One of Washington, D.C.’s public radio stations is considering what has by now become a familiar format switch – dropping nearly all its classical music programming in favor of news and talk shows. WETA has been plagued by low ratings in recent years, and executives at the station fear that a classical format simply isn’t viable in an era when public broadcasters are forced to play much the same numbers game as commercial stations. However, there is a twist to WETA’s proposed change – the District already has an all-news public radio station, and the new format at WETA would likely duplicate a great deal of the programming that area listeners can already hear on WAMU.
Is Evolution Disappearing From US Classrooms?
“Though the teaching of evolution makes the news when officials propose, as they did in Georgia, that evolution disclaimers be affixed to science textbooks, or that creationism be taught along with evolution in biology classes, in districts around the country, even when evolution is in the curriculum it may not be in the classroom, according to researchers who follow the issue.”
Kramer: Johnson Was “Evil Influence”
Hilton Kramer believes more attention should have been paid to architect Philip Johnson’s admiration for the Nazis. “I daresay that for most of us, this chronicle of perfidy amounts to something far more significant than a ‘passing admiration for Hitler.’ The fact is that notwithstanding his aesthetic and intellectual talents, Philip Johnson remained at heart a cynic, an immoralist and a profoundly corrupted character—in short, an evil influence.”
Europe’s Big Museums Hurt As Governments Pinch Pennies
“Europe’s flagship museums — the Uffizi, the Musee du Louvre in Paris, and the British Museum in London — are feeling the pinch. Thrifty governments facing European Union deficit limits are capping cultural handouts and compelling museums to make money on the side by seeking sponsors, hiring out halls and selling snacks and knickknacks. As a result, even as museums draw record crowds — the Louvre hosted 6 million visitors last year, half the turnout at EuroDisney, Europe’s largest theme park — they increasingly rely on sponsors.”