Studio Macbeth, which does 3-D visualizations for advertiser and science illustration, has misplaced truth in history and missed the line between history and art. Macbeth of Kingston, N.Y., has produced “new” photos of Abraham Lincoln in what it calls “the first time an historic figure has been re-created digitally with photographic results that now make possible an unlimited library of images.” They’re talking videos.
Tag: 07.20.08
The High School Musical Phenomenon
Even though it happened out of the usual order, “High School Musical” has quickly managed to do what Disney behemoths from “The Little Mermaid” to “Beauty and the Beast” were bred to do — it’s pretty much taken over the world. In just 30 months, “High School Musical” has spawned a sequel and morphed into a stage musical, concert tour, ice tour, best-selling book series, video game, a reality TV series and, next, a theatrical film opening Oct. 24.
Prisoners Need Music Too (A Business Model)
“More than 2.3 million people were locked up in federal, state or local systems at midyear 2007, according to the U.S. Dept. of Justice, and they want their Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd just like everyone else. Enter North Hollywood-based Pack Central, which runs a mail-order operation for about 50,000 prisoners. It stocks about 10,000 CDs and 5,000 cassette titles.”
Marco Barricelli On His New Job Running Shakespeare Santa Cruz And Having Cancer
“Not only is he running a company for the first time in his 26-year career, but he is also battling lymphatic cancer. He found out about the disease just a few months after taking the reins at Santa Cruz. ‘One of the things about facing your mortality is that you realize there is nothing sillier about a bunch of adults walking around getting angry about a play. It puts everything in perspective’.”
Pianist Leon Fleisher At 80: Music In The Middle
“Music is a wonderful thing, but it’s just dots on a paper until we come along and bring those dots to life. A self-aggrandizing approach to great music doesn’t really work. It’s very tempting to turn oneself into the star, but we ain’t the stars. We are the middlemen.”
The Fall Of TV’s Discontent
“The fall 2008 TV season has been decimated by the writers strike. Audiences are shrinking. The most honored dramas are on cable. Some predict nearly half of all TV watching will be done on the Internet in five years. While advertisers are still willing to pony up, the writers’ strike so seriously damaged production schedules that viewers won’t see much that’s new until January. The posture of the traditional TV industry is decidedly defensive. What can they do to save themselves?”
William Butler Yeats Reborn For A Digital Age
“With the stroke of a finger on a touch screen, a visitor can flip through pages written 100 years ago and summon an image of this letter, or any other entry. With audiotapes, four short films and software that brings light and breath to aging manuscripts, it amounts to a digital resurrection, allowing Yeats to stride again along the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries.”
Paris As Cultural Backwater
“Today, to France’s worry, Paris is no longer the place to be. To the rest of the world, the city – for all its beauty – has become a backwater in many cultural areas. Its temples to the arts are indeed filled. But the worshippers these days are consumers, not creators. They are mainly foreign tourists who come to see the eternal Mona Lisa, post-modern American artists, the French Impressionists and Moliere. The city chemistry that produced rawness, dynamism, change and challenge seems absent.”
Architecture As Diplomacy (Er, Not Really)
Berlin’s newly-christened $143-million American embassy, “designed by the Santa Monica firm Moore Ruble Yudell, is something of an anti-monument — a five-story, low-slung, sandstone-colored palimpsest on which is inscribed the complicated history of urbanism in Berlin, the troubled state of U.S. embassy design and the pitfalls of slavishly contextual architecture.”
French Resistance To Google Book Project Is Crumbling
“When Google unveiled its Book Search project in late 2004, no country protested louder against this digital battering-ram of “Anglo-Saxon” hegemony than France. Now even France has started to succumb. The municipal library in Lyon – the second largest in the land – has signed up with Google Book Search to digitise half a million titles already in the public domain.”