Tag: 07.31.05

Is Knowing The Cultural Reference Better Than The Culture Itself?

“The traditional benefits of entertainment were the pleasures of the experience. For that, you had to see the movie, read the book or hear the CD. These were — and are — powerful pleasures, powerful enough to make entertainment a multibillion-dollar industry. But as society has grown more complex and the information we can know has grown exponentially, knowingness — the idea of being in the know and of having the expertise to navigate through the haystacks of available information to find the needles — has come to provide an arguably more satisfying form of gratification. That’s why the knowingness industry, including the Internet, seems more vital than the entertainment industry. Google is the new metaphor for fulfillment.”

Ode To Jock Soto

“Jock Soto, leading dancer of the New York City Ballet, has taken partnering into realms of sleight-of-hand undreamed of before him. Short and solidly built, inscrutably dark-featured, half-Navajo Indian and half-Puerto Rican, this man does not resemble the usual slender-lined ballet prince, yet throughout his career ballerinas queued up to be partnered by him, and when he gave his final performance at the age of 40 last month in New York’s State Theatre, they were queueing up again, to shower him with red roses.”

Making The Kirov’s London Home

Getting the Kirov Ballet and Opera into London for their annual visit is a major undertaking full of risk. “Unloading them into the Royal Opera House, setting them up and changing them over, while allowing the performers time for rehearsal on stage – all on the tightest of schedules – is an operation that would tax the military, achieved only by slogging through wickedly unsociable hours.”

Travelling In Mystery

A book titled “The Traveller” has climbed the bestseller lists, but the author is a mystery. “The book, which has just been published in Britain, is written by the improbably named John Twelve Hawks who nobody, not even his New York editors at Random House, has yet met. Billed as a JD Salinger or Thomas Pynchon-style recluse, Twelve Hawks, which his publishers admit is a pseudonym, has refused to appear in public to promote his hugely successful debut work. Even a film offer from Universal has failed to flush him out.”

The Virtual Library, Left For You To Find

“Bookcrossing started in April 2001 in Missouri, and now has 350,000 members in 90 countries who have liberated more than two million books in dozens of different languages. The concept is finders-keepers meets interactive virtual lending library. The rules are simple. First take a book down from your shelf. It should be one you love. (Ideally, if you ruled the world you would make reading of this book compulsory.) Log onto bookcrossing.com and register. Print out a label and a number for your book. Release it into the wild. The person who finds the book will see the invitation to the website where they can log their find, eventually write a review and then rerelease the book themselves. In theory, as the book travels around, it should build up an online profile of reviews.”

London – Is Taller Better?

Giant highrise buildings threaten to transform London’s skyline. “So far only the Swiss Re tower has been built, but a dozen or more are in the pipeline. They reveal that London’s problem is not that it is turning itself into a Dallas or a Houston, as we used to worry. To judge by the wave of new developments on the way, London is going to be the nearest Europe comes to Shanghai. Footloose international finance, a mayor intoxicated by high-rise architecture, and a developer-friendly planning system have unleashed a wave of developments that are bigger, and brasher, than anything the city has yet seen.”

Naked Offer: Museum Offers Free Admission

Austria’s Leopold Museum made an offer to art lovers Saturday: Show up naked and you get in free. “Scores of naked or scantily clad people wandered the museum, lured by an offer of free entry to The Naked Truth, an exhibition of early 1900s erotic art, if they showed up wearing just a swimsuit – or nothing at all. With a midsummer heatwave sweeping Vienna, the normally reserved museum decided to make the most of its cool, climate-controlled space.”

Hollywood Slump – The Best Thing That Could Happen?

Hollywood is frustrated by this year’s movie box office slup. “But what if the slump lingers? That could turn out to be the best thing that’s happened to Hollywood in years. Maybe the powers that be would be forced to take chances once again. Studio heads might begin to think smaller and therefore be more willing to risk giving fresh voices with new ideas a chance to express themselves. It’s a path that may be fraught with peril, but that’s always been how the greatest and most enduring Hollywood movies have come into being. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a Hollywood like the one in the ’70s…”