The Festival “claimed on Monday that almost two million tickets had been sold for this year’s event, a 5% increase on the previous record breaking year. However, it has emerged that some venues offering free and unticketed shows were included in the figures. An extra 120,000 ticket sales were added to the final total this year.”
Tag: 09.03.10
How The Brain Interprets Images (It Needs Help)
The precise neural mechanism that provokes the brain to switch its view of a scene is unknown, but it is thought to play a major role in perception by acting as a sort of reality check. “We need a trigger to prompt possible different interpretations so that we don’t get stuck with a potentially incorrect interpretation of the world.”
Poets Publish To Fight UK Public Funding Cuts
More than 100 poets have contributed “to Emergency Verse: an anthology of poems to be published online in protest at the coalition government’s public spending cuts…The e-anthology will be mass-emailed to No 10 Downing Street and every Whitehall department this month, as civil servants grapple with Treasury demands for savings of up to 40%.”
When The Black Panthers Defined Popular Culture
“Even though they dwindled into irrelevance before the end of the Seventies, the Panthers, their guns, their afros and their attitude still help to define popular culture, for better or worse.”
Serenade, The Dance That Created American Ballet
In this piece, “Balanchine made a dance that would become the Rosetta Stone for a new kind of dancer, the American classical dancer. He brought a kind of democracy into the hierarchical land of ballet classicism, lifting it from its dusty 19th-century splendor, and created, simultaneously, an aristocracy for American dancers who had none.”
The March of Time: Revisiting the Apotheosis of the Newsreel
“‘Newsreels’ seems inadequate” as a name for these short films made from 1935-51; “they are longer, more detailed and much more opinionated than the standard-issue newsreels that preceded them. ‘Documentaries’ is closer, but the blaring orchestrations and outlandish voice-overs sound nothing like a modern documentary.”
Montreal Symphony Hangs On to Kent Nagano for Three More Years
“Even hardboiled Nagano skeptics, whether inside or outside the orchestra, are probably pleased with the stability that comes with this announcement. Four years after his appointment, Nagano still sells out concerts, in good economic times and bad.”