The Village Voice and its chain of five other alt weeklies is merging with the New Times chain. “The deal would create a chain of 17 free weekly newspapers around the country with a combined circulation of 1.8 million.”
Tag: 10.24.05
Not Much Alt About Alt-Weeklies Anymore
Critics worry that the merger of Village Voice and New Times will corporatize the alternative weeklies. “Despite their liberal, anti-establishment pedigree, alternative weeklies such as New Times and Village Voice long ago became big business. They are free and stuffed with music and arts coverage, they rake in piles of cash from entertainment ads and personal classifieds. Village Voice Media is owned by a consortium of investment banks that beat out New Times five years ago.”
In Publishing, All Roads Lead To Frankfurt
Even in the era of instant electronic communication, the annual five-day Frankfurt Book fair is still the publishing world’s event of the year. “In a way, the parties are now the real business. ‘It’s the chance to rub shoulders with these really intelligent writers and publishers, and to talk about books that you care deeply about. That’s the reason you’re in this field. You forget that sometimes in New York because of the overwhelming business-ness of it’.”
Dance Detectives
“Like a laboratory devoted to the science of dance, Movement Research is so important that without it, much of contemporary dance in New York would be left without a pulse. The organization, led for the last three years by Carla Peterson, was established in 1978 as an artist-centered service institution, and the goal has remained much the same: to foster investigation in dance.”
Scream: A Museum That’s Kept Its Sense Of Humor
The Munch Museum in Oslo, which lost its “The Scream” painting last year in a dramatic theft, is selling a board game in its gift shop based on the incident. “Players of The Mystery of the Scream, a game aimed at the family market, must hunt down the robber before he reaches a criminal paradise.”
Why Is Damien Hirst Living In Mexico?
“I suppose the whole thing really is death. I think that the way that I deal with death is a bit Mexican. In England people hide or shy away from death and ideas about it, whereas Mexicans seem to walk hand in hand with it. In that way I feel a bit liberated here.”
Norman Foster World
Architect Norman Foster is at the top of his profession. “He has always wanted to create buildings informed by the structure, logic and beauty of bridges and machinery. One of the first architectural prizes he won was for a working drawing of a windmill. In designing an ultramodern building for a modernising China, he has no intention of drawing on that country’s antique design traditions, but on its young industrial crafts, technologies and engineering processes.”
Death Of Writing And Other Old Battles
Is Ben Marcus right that experimental writing is dying? He’s “justified in criticizing a publishing industry, and a culture, that often recycles the same ideas and stories while ignoring writers whose work is too unpleasant, or destabilizing, or unsympathetic to be absorbed at a glance. His list of writers who ‘interrogate the assumptions of realism and bend the habitual gestures around new shapes’ is one many readers would embrace, and his contention that The New Yorker doesn’t publish enough challenging fiction is absolutely on the mark. But ultimately he’s pantomiming a battle that, if it ever really existed, ended decades ago.”
A Big Advance In Preserving Documents?
Paper rots, even in books, and preserving documents has long bedeviled librarians. Now “conservationists are buzzing about a new technique developed by Ink Cor, a research group concerned with neutralizing the wasting effect of corrosive inks without damaging the underlying paper. The group recently completed a prototype treatment using halide salts, a colorless antioxidant that can prolong the life span of paper containing corrosive ink by a factor of 10.”
Online Music – Who Gets The Money?
The online music business is booming. But there’s a fight between producers and musicians about how to divy up the new income. “Thanks to the success of iPod and iTunes, online music sales are growing at a healthy clip. But record labels complain they aren’t recouping expenses, while musicians say they’re being squeezed to take a pay cut.”