HBO is developing a new series that we have to hope is science fiction: “Set 25 to 40 years in the future, when the precipitous decline of the U.S. leads to a mass exodus of its citizens, Americatown centers on a cluster of newly arrived American immigrants in a big foreign city.”
Tag: 09.29.08
Do Maya Lin’s Earthworks Make Sense When They’re Not Memorials?
“With this new piece [‘Storm King Wavefield’], her career seems bracketed by works whose successes and failures depend as much on whom they’re for as how they look.”
Why You Paid Too Much on eBay
“[Researchers] enrolled volunteers in a series of simulated silent ‘auctions’ (bidding against a person they had met) and ‘lotteries’ (deciding repeatedly whether or not to bid against a computer). All while lying in functional MRI machines that scanned their brains… Overbidding was highest when the auction emphasized loss.”
Did A Stage Extension Mar Symphony’s Season Opener?
The Oregon Symphony opened its 2008-09 season with Beethoven’s 9th, and critic David Stabler was notably unimpressed with the quality of the performance. So, it seems, were a number of patrons, and even orchestra staffers. Was a stage extension the source of the problem? “Saturday’s balances were so skewed,” Stabler writes, “even the symphony staff is wondering if the extension is to blame.” One orchestra violist blogged about what went wrong in the Beethoven.
Eat Your Heart Out, I. M. Pei
Paris is to get its first new skyscraper in three decades: a tall, slender pyramid by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron (who designed the “bird’s nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympics).
No Visa For Actor, No Opener For UCLA Festival
“The visa application for Austrian actor Martin Niedermair has been rejected by the Dept. of Homeland Security, forcing UCLA Live to cancel the first production of its Intl. Theater Festival. … UCLA Live asserted that the labor union Actors’ Equity automatically rejects visiting visas to any actor performing in English, which has happened for every English-speaking production they have imported.”
The Best Thing About Censorship —
— is that it doesn’t work. The author of the much-challenged book The Golden Compass says that “they never learn. The inevitable result of trying to ban something – book, film, play, pop song, whatever – is that far more people want to get hold of it than would ever have done if it were left alone. Why don’t the censors realise this?”
Coming Soon: Another Tech Bust
Jason Calacanis, founder of the Silicon Alley Reporter and the search engine Mahalo.com (powered by actual humans), says that “50-80% of the venture-backed startups currently operating will shut down or go on life-support (i.e. 3-4 folks working on them) within the next 18 months.”
What Can Choke and Californication Teach Us About Sex Addiction?
“So is Don Juanism funny, or is it sad? The pop-culture ambivalence reflects an uncertainty that extends all the way through the medical establishment – to the sex therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists who can’t agree on how to define sexual addiction, or indeed whether it should be called an ‘addiction’ at all.”
New York Sun Sets for Good
The conservative-leaning daily publishes its final edition on Sept. 30 after attempts to find new investors fell through. While “the paper… took political and socio-economic stances that were unpopular in a city teeming with Democrats,” many observers praised its local news and extensive arts coverage. But the Sun had a paid circulation of only 14,000. “The paper definitely carved itself a niche, but it wasn’t profitable.”