“Increasingly, movie makers (especially European ones) are depicting immigration not as a one-way journey but rather as a more or less permanent state of flux between worlds that may seem very different but are, in fact, steadily becoming more inter-connected.”
Tag: 09.14.08
Who Killed Book Publishing?
“The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world. ”
Queen Victoria Was ‘A Passionate Young Woman’ – Who Knew?
A new biography depicts the monarch who came to embody stuffy English rectitude as an endearing but hot-tempered and headstrong girl who fought endless battles with a controlling, power-hungry mother.
The Cell Phone As Movie Storytelling Device
“For dramatic writers in many media, cellphones’ ubiquity — and the particular way they condense time and space — creates both opportunities and obstacles.”
Can Serious Literature Survive In A Sea Of Digital Fragments?
“A transatlantic debate is currently raging about whether a decade of staring at computer screens, sending emails and text messages, and having our research needs serviced instantly by Google and Wikipedia, has taken a terrible toll on our attention, until our brains have been reconfigurated and can no longer adjust the tempo of our mental word-processing to let us read a book all the way through.”
The End Of The Overweight Opera Star?
“While it would have been acceptable to audiences in the 1980s to watch a three-hour production of La Bohème with Pavarotti in which the famous tenor would not move at all, those days are now gone. The new crop of performers require a higher level of fitness than before as they dart about the stage.”
The $1.5 Billion Writer
James Patterson “currently outsells JK Rowling, John Grisham and Dan Brown put together. This year he’s on target to sell more than 20m books in the US alone, adding to his $1.5bn in global sales, making him the world’s bestselling author by a mile.” But Patterson’s “scribbling” isn’t just a super-efficient brand, reaching for global dominance; it’s also a collaborative effort, honed and refined by a number of highly talented individuals.
Scaled-Down English National Opera Tracks A More Modest Path
For a thrusting and hungry tyro MD, Edward Gardner strikes a strangely wary note. He talks about the need for adventure, but enterprise is tempered with realism. ENO gives fewer performances now than at any time since the company moved to the London Coliseum 40 years ago. A playbill that once boasted more than 200 performances of more than 20 works is now reduced to about 115 of 12-13 main-stage titles.
What A New Mark Taper Means To LA Theatre
“The house that Gordon Davidson built to showcase bold American playwriting is still Los Angeles’ flagship theater. At once intimate and substantial, the Taper (now led by Center Theatre Group artistic director Michael Ritchie) has long been one of the most respected platforms for drama in the country. But the refurbished Taper is a reminder that it’s not simply architectural majesty and attention-grabbing world premieres that give a theater its distinctive identity.”
Global Trend – Middle Class Against Democracy
“In 2007, the number of countries with declining freedoms exceeded those with advancing freedoms by nearly four to one, according to a recent report by Freedom House, an organization that monitors global democracy trends. And the villains, surprisingly enough, are the same people who supposedly make democracy possible: the middle class.”