The world’s largest chamber music festival finishes up with a 20 percent increase in attendance. Most popular concert? The Canadian Brass. Least: Ensemble Intercontemporain. – Ottawa Citizen
Tag: 08.07.00
DIGGING OUT DOWN UNDER
Opera Australia is at a crossroads. “OA is saddled with a $5.9 million accumulated deficit, largely the result of its 1996 merger with the debt-crippled Victoria State Opera, and there has been a run of poor box office returns in Melbourne.” The company’s future is threatened, and the government is reviewing the company’s operations. But the “OA plans to sing and play its way out of debt.” – Sydney Morning Herald
PLAYING IN POVERTY
Why is Canada’s National Youth Orchestra languishing? “The NYO is limping through the summer, barely recognized, tightening its belt at every stop. Its training period has been reduced from four weeks to three. Its annual summer tour schedule has been slashed virtually in half. Its government funding has been cut from 77 per cent of revenues to 48 per cent. And the size of the symphony has fallen from 105 members to 84.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
THE TRUTH ABOUT STORIES
Why do literary critics seem to be tripping over distinctions between fiction and non-fiction? “The trendy new genre ‘creative nonfiction’ is just a clever marketing tool — a way to sell the old tall tale, part fact, part fiction, by assuring us that what we are reading is ‘real.’ And that sense of clarity is not just reassuring, it also demands less of the reader — who does not have to suspend disbelief — and of the writer, who does not have to work as hard at rendering a story believable.” – San Francisco Examiner
DOING THE MATH
Xlibris, the book self-publisher believes it will make money in increments. “I’d say it’s around two bucks for each copy of each title. Let’s say I make $600 per title and I have 250,000 titles. Okay, well my calculator just broke, so it’s a big enough number that my calculator’s not happy. I think it’s about $150 million. So, you see, the whole industry only makes sense if you believe that in, say, six to seven years, there will be close to half a million books published every year. We’re doing 500 titles a month by ourselves, and our growth rate is around 20 percent a month. So, you do the math.” – Inside.com
TAKE A CHANCE ON DANCE
Is there any such thing as an avant-garde in dance? The Lincoln Center Festival keeps bravely asserting that there is. But this year’s trio of “experimentalists” didn’t do much to provide evidence for same. – New York Magazine
REAL CREDIT
The Writers Guild of America has corrected the credits of eight blacklisted writers on 14 films released between 1951 and 1964. The writers had been credited as pseudonyms to subvert McCarthy-era blacklists. – The Age (Melbourne) (AP)
FILM AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESSION
“The decade of the 1980s in Argentina was characterized by profound political, economic and social upheavals. Yet the Argentine film industry in this period had retained a remarkable ability to stay afloat and adapt to the radical shifts of the forces in power. This skill was seen not only in production but in the areas of distribution and exhibition as well. The connection between the different governments and the national cinema was more complex than what emerged from the accounts of Argentine and foreign scholars about filmmaking during the 1980s.” – The Idler