The finale of Fox’s “American Idol” averaged 33.7 million views. “That was a bigger audience than the 33.1 million who watched the Academy Awards in March, traditionally the most-viewed entertainment event of the year, according to Nielsen Media Research. During the last half hour of the 8 to 10 p.m. special, when the winner was announced, viewership climbed to just under 40 million people.”
Tag: 05.23.03
Ballet’s Hot Choreographer
Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon is the 30-year-old “golden boy of international ballet”. “I’m trying now to find ways to distill narrative so that it borders on the abstract. I want to create a world that is not specific to either the narrative or the abstract.”
Oooh, I’m Sooo Bad (Now Buy My Book)
“Performing shameful, humiliating acts and then writing about it for profit are not new, perhaps, but the trend seems to be accelerating with the recent crop of sinners clutching book contracts. Such books seem to revel in their authors’ surpassing badness, in an unashamed — indeed, almost gleeful – recitation of sins. The public, presumably, goes tsk-tsk – and then turns the page for more.”
TV: What We Watched This Year
The final numbers are in, and this season’s TV ratings champs can be declared. Wanna play “who are the big winners?” Okay – a hint – that series about the guy who was supposed to be a millionaire looking for a wife, only he wasn’t rich but the women didn’t know it? He landed at No. 2 for the season. Need to know more? Didn’t think so.
Looters Stripping Bare Iraqi Archaeological Sites
“Mobs of treasure hunters are tearing into Iraqi archaeological sites, stealing urns, statues, vases and cuneiform tablets that often date back 3,000 years and more to Babylon and Sumer, archaeologists say.”
Pondering The Theory Years
In the most recent past, critics have returned to studying art in historical social context. The art theory years of the 60s and 70s seem like a distant past. “As we look back at the theory years today, now that the fierce polemical passions have waned, the transformation of literary studies through several phases in a single generation seems astonishing. Where did it come from? Are its sources to be found in the 1960s, the tumultuous decade in which it emerged? In the poststructuralist phase, scholarship and criticism that had been focused on individual writers gave way to a skeptical approach to all interpretation.”