Tag: 08.05.04

But We Already Knew How Good The Shining Was

How scary is that new suspense movie that just came out? University researchers in the UK can tell you, right down to the tenth decimal place. The researchers claim to have invented a mathematical formula that can quantify such things: “[it] combines elements of suspense, realism and gore, plus shock value, to measure how scary a film is.” As it turns out, The Shining is the perfect formulaic scary movie, while Jaws exhibits the best use of non-gratuitous gore in a scary film.

This Is Why Most Ballet Companies Only Cast Swans & Mice

The Bolshoi Ballet needed a horse for its production of Marius Petipa’s The Pharaoh’s Daughter at the Royal Opera House in London. They planned to bring one with them from home, but quarantine laws interfered. So they found an English horse to stand in, and that animal promptly injured itself. Finally, a local trick-rider provided one of his horses for the Bolshoi’s use, but the difficulties didn’t end there…

Hitting Too Close To Home

A devastating indictment of race relations in the Upper Midwest is currently playing at a theater in the Twin Cities. “The Last Minstrel Show,” which details (and satirizes in explicit form) the lynching of three black men in Duluth, is hard to watch and even harder to analyze, and apparently, Minnesotans don’t want to hear it. The show is closing after only two weeks, due to abysmal ticket sales in a city that normally embraces theater of all types. “If virtually no one attends a play about an event virtually no one wants to talk about, then, as the show’s final production number asserts with nonchalant gaiety, ‘Nothing happened.’ Right? Isn’t that where we’re at societywise on the whole race issue?”

An Art Magazine For Ordinary People

“James Truman, editorial director of Condé Nast, has developed a prototype of a luxe and glossy fine arts magazine that he hopes to begin publishing in 2006. The magazine is designed, he said, to bring visual art, or at least a magazine about it, to the masses.” The philosophy of the as-yet untitled magazine will be to treat art pieces as just one more type of desirable object to be coveted by consumers. Rather than adopt the high-minded intellectual tone of most art magazines, Truman plans on using his publication to tell what he calls “curated stories” about art and the people who create it.

Gehry Would Be Perfect For This Job…

For years, London’s South Bank Arts Centre has struggled with a plague of skateboarders. But the complex’s latest management team has taken a new approach, trying to improve relations between the arts community and the skaters. Now, five “skatable sculptures” have been commissioned for the centre’s undercroft, in the hope that skaters will embrace the idea of a designated area for their display of skills.

Seville Music Festival Postponed Indefinitely

“Ambitious plans for an open-air production of Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ in Seville, Spain, and for a music festival of which it was to be the centerpiece, were postponed indefinitely Wednesday. Organizers said they were unable to find a top-level conductor to replace Lorin Maazel, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, who earlier this week withdrew from the project on medical grounds.”

Did Mostly Mozart Just Need New Leadership?

If there was ever any doubt that a conductor can revitalize a struggling ensemble, Louis Langrée is putting it to rest with his debut this summer at the helm of New York’s Mostly Mozart festival. In retrospect, says Anthony Tommassini, the fault for the festival’s notorious struggles in recent years must be laid at the feet of Langrée’s predecessor, Gerard Schwarz. “It’s sad to have to say this so definitively, but Mr. Schwarz, though a tenacious defender of the basic concept of the festival over his 17-year-tenure as director, was just wrong for the job. He lacked a compelling artistic vision and was too limited as a conductor.”