It almost went unnoticed, what with Harry Potter and Hillary Clinton grabbing all the book-based headlines over the past month, but John Steinbeck’s classic version of the Cain and Abel story, East of Eden recently sold 750,000 copies inside of a week. Why the rush on a 50-year-old novel? Oprah made it a selection of her newly-revived book club. “Organized book groups, which make reading a social experience, are springing up like weeds, especially in bookstores and libraries – providing a critical marketing opportunity for a publishing industry desperate to reverse sluggish sales numbers.”
Tag: 07.03.03
Artists’ Strike In France Threatens Summer Season
“They’ve already called off operas and foiled film festivals. On Wednesday, thousands of France’s performing artists took their strike on the road, puffing into tubas or waving puppets as they marched through Paris’ streets in a demonstration. Now that spring strikes by transport workers, teachers and trash collectors have ended, a standoff over unemployment benefits for artists is threatening to ruin France’s summer artistic season. Dozens of performances… have been canceled. Actors, musicians, filmmakers and theater technicians are worried about changes to a unique French system that protects performers with an unemployment plan that takes into account their downtime between projects.”
State of the Music Industry: The Public View
Participants in a large interactive panel discussion on the future of the British music industry believe that the pop single is on its way out, that the talent pool has been overshadowed by the bland, lifeless, mediocre pop stemming from reality TV shows, and that the ‘dance culture’ popular among British youth has created a generation which is much less likely to buy traditional albums at all. Singer Beverly Knight summed up the feelings of many in the discussion: “Back in the day the chances were that unless it was a novelty record, it was a really good song. It’s hard to sit at home and watch bands you know have been put together by a TV show. It’s mediocrity dressed up as greatness.”
Bringing Back Oscar’s Integrity
Hollywood is getting tough. This week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, which hands out those little gold Oscar statues each spring, announced new rules designed to prevent studio executives from “overzealously” campaigning for a particular film, director, or actor to win a high-profile award. In the past, the AMPAS had employed a set of “guidelines” for such purposes, but many studios openly flouted them, so the hope is that the more stringent code will cause execs to think twice. Penalties for breaking the rules include losing one’s seat at the Oscar ceremony, and, for voting members of the Academy, suspension or expulsion from that position.
I Sing Of Ireland
Just as England has been wondering about the health of its pop music business, there are those who wonder if Irish music has also taken a dive. But, writes Neil McCormick, “reports of Ireland’s musical demise have been greatly exaggerated. Ireland is a musical country, something that shows no sign of abating. There is intense activity on every level…”
Destruction of An Historic Culture
Iraq was once a center for art and culture. But it has been in “steep decline for twenty years. The loss into exile of three million people, among them many of the country’s most gifted, has arguably been far more destructive than recent wartime damage. The reduction of the entire middle class to deep poverty, one result of the international sanctions imposed since 1990, compounded the misery. The sanctions — or, as Iraqis say, the siege—had the further effect of sealing them off from advances elsewhere in the world, and even from the hope of catching up. In the past decade a kind of rottenness set in. When I saw Baghdad in 1990, with its neat, palm-lined boulevards, it looked not unlike Kuwait or Riyadh. A decade later the city looked more like Khartoum or Kinshasa, a place of brownouts, grasping bureaucrats, and leaky drains, its broken streets packed with the aimless unemployed.”