“Vienna State Opera is under pressure to make savings of 10 million euros (£7.8m) after a warning from the Austrian government.”
Tag: 07.27.12
How “Shades Of Grey” Blew Out Publishing Sales
“It’s not news that “word of mouth” has become a business model in the book industry. But E.L. James, a forty-nine-year-old former television executive from West London whose real name is Erika Leonard, has exceeded the sales feats of previous reader-discovered authors by such a staggering magnitude that she is in a category of her own.”
Should You Tweet The Show You’re At?
“If you’re at a gig and haven’t shared a blurry Instagram picture of the lead singer on every social platform available, then that gig might as well not have happened. In the age of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, there are a multitude of ways to avoid actually watching the band you’ve paid good money to see and instead show off to your friends who aren’t there with you.”
UK Movie Box Office Passes $1 Billion For First Time
UK box-office takings passed £1bn for the first time. The British Film Institute, publishing its 10th annual Statistical Yearbook yesterday, hailed 2011 as a year in which “British film thrived”.
$30M Worth Of Indian Antiquities Seized In Manhattan
“A crooked Manhattan art dealer had a $30 million treasure trove of stolen antiquities that would make Indiana Jones jealous – including ancient carvings and statues swiped from temples in India and other countries, authorities charged yesterday.”
The Australian Ballet Heads Into The Outback
The young dancers of the national company’s touring troupe, mostly in their late teens and finishing their studies at The Australian Ballet School, spend six weeks each winter giving performances in the old theatres of Australia’s far-flung small towns.
Life Imitates Art In The Bayreuth-Nikitin-Swastika Tattoo Affair
Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, in which Yevgeny Nikitin was going to sing the title role before news came out that he once had a swastika inked into his chest, “is about a man with a secret, a youthful mistake that he spends a long, long time paying for. … But while the details [of Nikitin’s story] keep altering, their implications are profound for a festival that cannot and should not stop thinking about its past.”
Painter Karl Benjamin, 86
He was “a painter of dazzling geometric abstractions who established a national reputation in 1959 as one of four Los Angeles-based Abstract Classicists and created a highly acclaimed body of work that celebrates the glories of color in all its variations.”
Handling 23 2000-Pound Dragons In One Production
The stadium show How to Train Your Dragon “is a big, brassy live version of the popular 2010 film based on Cressida Cowell’s books. Backed by DreamWorks with what must have been enough money to buy a small country, it features 23 lifelike dragons that stomp around, blow smoke and fly, all quite convincingly.”