Valuable historic Hawaiian artifacts have shown up for sale in an antiques store. The question is: how did they get there?
Tag: 08.12.04
NYT, LAT Duke It Out For Movie Coverage
The New York Times is investing heavily in beefing up its reporting of the entertainment business. That’s causing the LA Times to guard its turf. “Beneath the vaingloriousness of any caged match between media rivals lies the reality of their motives for fighting in the first place. And so the question has to be asked: Isn’t pouring all this money and militia into something as ultimately silly as show-biz coverage demeaning to both papers when there’s real news not being covered?”
Turning Around The Bolshoi
“The years following the collapse of the Soviet Union were not kind to the estimable Moscow theatre, particularly its opera wing. Short of funds and lacking the kind of dynamic leadership Valery Gergiev brought to the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, the Bolshoi often seemed to be going through the motions.” But in the past few years the Bolshoi has undergone a dramatic transformation…
A Saga Of Movie-Making Hell
The making of an “Exorcist” prequel has been an extraordinary saga, involving “a series of wayward turns that had plagued ‘The Beginning’ since the beginning — a web of movie making, unmaking and remaking so infernally tangled as to give new meaning to the phrase ‘development hell’.”
This Summer’s Movies – Skewing Older
This summer’s story at the movies has been adults. As in movies made for adults. “Beneath the marketing hype luring young filmgoers to the latest blockbuster, Hollywood is quietly targeting older audiences with a surprisingly broad array of movies.”
“Celebrating” The Infomercial’s 20th Birthday
“This year is the 20th anniversary of those ubiquitous 28-minute feature-length TV ads, better known as infomercials. Every year, men and mostly women shell out more than a billion dollars buying up stain eliminators, hair removers, veggie choppers, fat reducers and more. If you include short-form spot ads that drive people to stores searching for “As Seen on TV” products, gross revenue for such infomercials rose to $154.1 billion last year. That’s almost an 81 percent jump in just six years. Combine TV, radio and Internet retailing, and it’s a staggering $256 billion industry.”
Is iTunes Killing Jazz?
Okay – maybe that’s an overstatement. But “the digital music era should offer listeners more information about jazz, not less. The stakes are high. If jazz fragments into millions of digital files, future generations could be left with a maddening cultural jigsaw puzzle. This music could quickly become one of the mysterious art forms that is translated to the public by a small group of experts.”
Seattle P-I Architecture Critic Quits Over Review
After Seattle Post-Intelligencer architecture critic Sheri Olson wrote a negative review of a local housing project, the architects threatened to sue. Olson – a freelancer – asked the paper to “guarantee that it would represent her should [the architects]decide to sue.” When the paper declined, Olson quit. Oddly, the architects – Weber + Thompson – didn’t dispute the quality of the building; rather, they maintain that “most of the changes… have been out of our control.”
Scandale! – Manet Son Really Brother?
A new documentary claims that Manet’s father, “one of France’s most esteemed judges, had an illegitimate son whom the painter brought up as his own.”
Movies Hit The Net (Legally)
Downloading movies over the internet is becoming a viable and popular business. “A technological step beyond video rentals and pay-per-view cable movie channels, these online movie services provide a legal and reliable way to download and stream thousands of films, from recently released Hollywood blockbusters to vintage serials.”