At a recent industry gathering on the future of television, the president of TiVo declared that “Attention Deficit Disorder is not just a disease, it’s a lifestyle.” And if Americans – particularly young Americans – are determined to watch what they want, when they want it, and to surf the ‘net for ‘extras’ and discuss what they’re watching in a chat room while the program is still on the air, who is anyone to stand in their way? Joanne Ostrow doesn’t particularly like the way this type of thinking points: “Judging by the panel, those in charge of capturing our attention in coming years are blind to any unpleasant sociological fallout.”
Tag: 07.20.03
Everything But The Cash
The city of Orlando wants to build a new performing arts center, and everything has been falling into place lately. The mayor is on board, and a prime plot of land in the downtown district has been acquired and earmarked for the project. There’s just one thing missing: $200 million. So far, not a single donor has come forward to offer assistance for the project, and one official has suggested that “presenting a community such as Orlando with a fund-raising goal as large as $200 million can be overwhelming.”
Madame Mao Goes To The Opera
Jiang Qing led the type of life so dramatically implausible, so full of power and corruption and disgrace and misery, that it could only ever be fully realized on the operatic stage. The wife of Mao Zedong, who was known in China as the White-Boned Demon, was already memorialized in song by John Adams in his opera, Nixon in China, but now, composer Bright Sheng has made her the title character in his latest work, Madame Mao, which premieres this weekend in Santa Fe. Sheng’s opera presents Jiang Qing as a conflicted and multifaceted woman, to the degree that she is actually portrayed by two different singers representing the two distinct stages of her life.
Taking On The Blockbuster Culture
“A few decades ago, art lovers visiting an art museum for the first time would invariably ask, ‘Where are the best pictures that you own?’ But over the last 25 years or so, they’ve been trained to ask instead, ‘What exhibitions do you have on view right now?’ Museums have become more and more preoccupied, even obsessed, with their rosters of temporary shows… The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution’s repository for modern and contemporary art, has caught on to this new reality, acknowledged it as a problem, and set out to do something about it.”
Hollywood Learns To Interact With Online Critics
“Advance information about upcoming film releases is stampeding online faster than ever — and studios are finally learning to fight back. As the Internet matures and the film industry gets smarter, the two are increasingly engaged in a pas de deux of guerrilla marketing, official leaks, manipulated early reviews, and legal strong-arming.”
Perfect Line, Perfect Movement, and Really Ugly Feet
Dance is all about line, and grace, and the beauty of the human form. But all art comes with a price, and while the dancers swooping and pouncing before us on a stage often appear to be impeccable specimens of the human aesthetic, you might not want to peer too closely at the ravaged soles inside those toe shoes. Says one Minneapolis-based dancer, “I sometimes can’t tell the difference between ballet and Chinese foot-binding. Both cripple you in the name of beauty. Yet it is this divine thing that I have to do.”
Subliminal No More: Product Placement Prepares To Attack
NBC’s newest entry in the Reality TV sweepstakes is called The Restaurant, and it chronicles the inner workings of an actual Manhattan eatery, from the chef to the busboys to the customers. The network wasn’t wild about the concept initially, but when the show’s creator pitched it to ad execs, he found more support than he ever could have dreamed of. “Product placement is hardly a new phenomenon on TV — think Coca-Cola’s imprint on Fox’s American Idol — but Restaurant represents what could be a new breed of TV program built around marketing messages.”
Concerto For Imagination
The world probably isn’t in desperate need of a bunch of new kinds of musical instrument, but sometimes necessity is the enemy of invention, and the participants in a Massachusetts residency sponsored by the Bang On A Can folks aren’t letting a lack of public clamor for their work discourage them. Among the new instruments now on display at Mass MOCA is the whirlycopter, which looks like “a cross between a helicopter and an electric chair,” yet sounds “like an Orthodox choir, chanting somewhere over in the next valley.” The idea, of course, is to make new music more accessible and, dare we say it, fun, as well as to free up the musical imaginations of the participants.
Playing Fast And Loose With Ticket Prices
Theatre tickets are starting to resemble airfares, and not just because they’re ridiculously expensive. Generally, when we go to the theatre, we expect to have paid the same price as the people on either side of us, but increasingly, Broadway producers are charging less for ticketbuyers willing and able to make their purchases well in advance, and even less for folks willing to be flexible about where they sit, and what date they attend the show. “For complete control — the ability to choose your seat and the date you sit there — you will probably pay top dollar. In most other cases, you can make a deal.”
Glimmer Of Hope In San Antonio
Mike Greenberg isn’t predicting a rebirth for the bankrupt San Antonio Symphony just yet, but he’s encouraged by the involvement of the city’s mayor, and the work of a new task force charged with developing new strategies for orchestral success in South Texas. “In 1994, a similar task force… worked for several months and produced a report that said essentially nothing of value. The 1994 report set cost and revenue goals, most of which the symphony achieved in the short term, but failed to address the fundamentals of the orchestra’s program and its relationship with the larger community. The current task force, it seems, intends to avoid that mistake.”