“In state after state, promoters say that burgeoning Mexican populations in towns little and big have hunkered down, out of sight and out of public events, to avoid confrontations withstepped-up immigration law enforcement. Their fear has, by all accounts, made a significant dent in the lucrative regional Mexican market, with audiences often leery of attending the weekend shows that are the bread and butter of this music genre.”
Tag: 09.30.07
Leaking Like A Sieve (A Music Management Strategy)
“Labels can fight the unauthorized release of their music as they have in the past with nasty court battles that tarnished the industry’s reputation. Or they can go with the flow, staying one step ahead of the leakers. Common sense suggests that album leaks can benefit both the label and the artist by providing exposure to the music, building good buzz for an upcoming release (assuming it doesn’t suck).”
An Illicit Puccini Affair! (Oh: A Lost Composition, Too.)
“Hundreds of letters and photographs found stuffed inside in a long-forgotten suitcase have thrown a tragic new light on the secret life of the great Italian composer Giacomo Puccini – and may also reveal a lost operatic composition.”
Explicit Sex In Dramas Has A Name: Hard-Core Art
“In the last few years, two American filmmakers, Vincent Gallo and John Cameron Mitchell, have depicted actual sex in their films — and have not been shy about admitting it. Recently, the Oscar-winning director Ang Lee earned an NC-17 rating for his ‘Lust, Caution.’ These films and (HBO show ‘Tell Me You Love Me’) fall under ‘hard-core art,’ said Linda Williams, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of books on both pornography and cinema.”
Talking Sense, And Dollars, About Book Reviews
Carlin Romano argues the case for book reviews, which are disappearing in American newspapers. “If you declare in your Weekend section that people should do anything but read on the weekend – catch a movie, watch a DVD, hit the music clubs, go cycling – readers will listen, and many will stop buying your paper.”
Superstitious? Avoid Verdi’s “La Forza Del Destino.”
Theatre people, with their trembling at the title of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, aren’t the only superstitious ones in the bunch. “There’s even a bad-luck equivalent to Macbeth – Verdi’s La forza del destino, a great, eventful, melody-rich work…. It’s hard to pinpoint where the reputation for trouble started, but a lot of opera types refer to Forza and bad luck in the same breath as if it were a firmly established fact.”
Free Admission Pays Off Nicely For Baltimore Museums
“The gamble of free admissions at Baltimore’s two largest art museums seems to be paying off. Admissions are soaring, and both the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Walters Art Museum report that they are attracting a more diverse crowd than ever before. Museum memberships have decreased, as was expected, but total donations are up,” and “administrators are triumphantly declaring their bold free-for-all experiment a success.”
League, B’way Stagehands Agree To More Talks
“The League of American Theaters and Producers, the organization representing most of Broadway’s theater owners and producers, has scheduled two more meetings this week with Local One, the stagehands’ union, a union spokesman said.” After setting a Sept. 30 deadline for negotiations and then moving it to Oct. 1, “in talks on Friday the league sought more negotiating dates. The union agreed to sessions Tuesday and Thursday.”
Supersize Dance Doesn’t Always Need The Big Stage
“For reasons both artistic and economic, many contemporary choreographers have abandoned the idea of a hierarchical presentational model, one that begins in ’emerging choreographer’ samplers, extends through midsize theaters like the Joyce and then ascends to spaces like the Brooklyn Academy of Music.”
Los Angeles’ Amazing Transformation
“Until recently, most of downtown L.A. at night looked like the set for a zombie movie. It was either empty or scary. There are lifelong Angelenos who have never been downtown after sunset. Aside from a Lakers game or a night at the opera, large stretches were no-go zones. Downtown L.A. was where you went on trial, not on a date. But now? Downtown is one of the hottest residential real estate markets on the West Coast, with a first wave of pioneering artistic types being smothered by a second, larger wave of 20- and 30-something trendsetters.”